“It’s a new school,” Caracal explained. “Much more advanced than the décadents! It’s educating the public up to itself little by little. It has taken frankly for its flag the exact word in all its crudity.”
“Say, rather, the dirty word,” said Phil.
Wherever they went there was the same atmosphere of infection. You would have said that, camping in modern Paris, there was a ville chaude of the Middle Ages, where “vérolez très précieux” made high festival with ribald companions. The look of the places was repulsive. In one they were served by mock galley-slaves dragging their chains behind them. In another there were grave-diggers, and they sat by coffins, and green flames burned inside of skulls.
“You, fever-patient, what do you take?” the waiter said to the customer; “and you, consumptive? What do you drink, moribund?”
And then the fever-patient or the moribund—some ruddy young man from Scotland—would answer timidly: “Oune bock.”
“That gives a high idea of Paris,” Phil said, as they went out. To him it all seemed stupid. What a contrast for him, after an evening passed with Ethel, were these pestiferous dives with their brute public, like pigs at the fattening! The pitiful sight recalled to him the weak-willed days of the past, the evenings at the Deux Magots, the masterpieces drawn in pencil on café tables and wiped off with a rag.
Caracal made a study of the different cabarets, preferring this one to that and drawing a dilettante’s distinctions between their poets and singers.
“Such an one enunciates well. Have you heard his ballad of ‘The Drunkard and the Rotting Dog’? That is art!”
And with an elegant gesture he fixed the monocle in his eye. Phil examined Caracal and tried to discern in his face the low instincts, the hatreds, the thumb-marks of degeneracy. He saw nothing but self-satisfaction.
They had arrived at The Pustule, the latest cabaret artistique.