Cabaret du Squelette!
The announcement of the droll promises—apparitions, visions, phantoms—had often made him smile when he passed near there to go to the Préfecture; this wineshop, the front of which was bordered with black, like a letter announcing a death, and which bore, grating as it swung at the end of an iron rod, a red lantern for a sign.
His little girls, when he laughingly spoke of the cabaret where the waiters were dressed like undertakers' assistants, turned pale, and plump little Mme. Bernardet, ordinarily smiling, would say with a sigh: "Is it possible that such sacrilegious things are permitted in the quarter?"
Bernardet good-naturedly replied: "Ah, my dear, where is the harm?"
"I know what I am talking about," his good wife said; "they are the pleasure of the unhealthy minded. They mock at death as they mock at everything else. Where will it all end? We shall see it"——
"Or we shall not see it," interrupted her husband, laughingly.
He went in there one evening, having a little time to himself, as he would have gone into a theatre. He knew something about this Cabaret du Squelette (meaning the wine shop of the skeleton). He found the place very droll.
A small hall which had a few months before been a common wine shop had been transformed into a lugubrious place. The walls were painted a dead black, and were hung with a large number of paintings—scenes from masked balls, gondola parades, serenades with a balcony scene, some of the lovers' rendezvous of Venice and an ideal view of Granada, with couples gazing at each other and sighing in the gondolas on the lagoons, or in the Andalusian courts—and in this strange place with its romantic pictures, souvenirs of Musset or of Carlo Gozzi, the tables were made in the form of coffins with lighted candles standing upon them, and the waiters were dressed as undertakers' assistants, with shiny black hats trimmed with crape, on their heads.
"What poison will you drink before you die?" asked one of the creatures of Bernardet.
Bernardet sat and gazed about him. A few "high-flyers" from the other side of Paris were there. Here and there a thief from that quarter sat alone at a table. Some elegants in white cravats, who had come there in correct evening dress, were going later, after the opera, to sup with some première. The police officer understood very well why the blasé came there. They wished to jog their jaded appetites; they sought to find some piment, a curry, spice to season the tameness of their daily existence. The coffin-shaped tables upon which they leaned their elbows amused them. Several of them had asked for a bavaroise, as they were on milk diet.