About Paris

by Richard Harding Davis

THE CHÂTEAU ROUGE

There is a little room at the rear, the walls of which are painted with scenes of celebrated murders, and the portraits of the murderers, of anarchists, and of their foes the police. A sharp-faced boy points to these with his cap, and recites his lesson in a high singsong, and in an argot which makes all he says quite unintelligible. He is interesting chiefly because the men of whom he speaks are heroes to him, and he roars forth the name of "Antoine, who murdered the policeman Jervois," as though he were saying Gambetta, the founder of the republic, and with the innocent confidence that you will share with him in his enthusiasm. The pictures are ghastly things, in which the artist has chiefly done himself honor in the generous use of scarlet paint for blood, and in the way he has shown how by rapid gradations the criminal descends from well-dressed innocence to ragged viciousness, until he reaches the steps of the guillotine at Roquette. It is a miserable chamber of horrors, in which the heavy-eyed absinthe-drinkers raise their heads to stare mistily at the visitor, and to listen for the hundredth time to the boy's glib explanation of each daub in the gallery around them, from the picture of the vermilion-cheeked young woman who caused the trouble, to an imaginative picture of Montfaucon covered with skulls, where, many years in the past, criminals swung in chains.

The café of Père Lunette is just around several sharp corners from the Château Rouge. It was originally presided over by an old gentleman who wore spectacles, which gave his shop its name. It is a resort of the lowest class of women and men, and its walls are painted throughout with faces and scenes a little better in execution than those in the Château Rouge, and a little worse in subject. It is a very small place to enjoy so wide-spread a reputation, and its front room is uninteresting, save for a row of casks resting on their sides, on the head of each of which is painted the portrait of some noted Parisian, like Zola, Eiffel, or Boulanger. The young proprietor fell upon us as his natural prey the night we visited the place, and drove us before him into a room in the rear of the wineshop. He was followed as a matter of course by a dozen men in blouses, and as many bareheaded women, who placed themselves expectantly at the deal tables, and signified what it was they wished to drink before going through the form of asking us if we meant to pay for it. They were as ready to do their part of the entertainment as the actors of the theatre are ready to go on when the curtain rises, and there was nothing about any of them to suggest that he or she was there for any other reason than the hope of a windfall in the person of a stranger who would supply him or her with money or liquor. A long-haired boy with a three days' growth of hair upon his chin, of whom the proprietor spoke proudly as a poet, recited in verse a long descriptive story of what the pictures on the wall were intended to represent, and another youth, with a Vandyck beard and slouched hat, and curls hanging to his shoulder, sang Aristide Bruant's song of "Saint Lazare." All of the women of the place belonged to the class which spends many months of each year in that prison. The music of the song is in a minor key, and is strangely sad and eerie. It is the plaint of a young girl writing to her lover from within the walls of the prison, begging him to be faithful to her while she is gone, and Bruant cynically makes her designate three or four feminine friends as those whose society she particularly desires him to avoid. The women, all of whom sang with sodden seriousness, may not have appreciated how well the words of the song applied to themselves, but you could imagine that they did, and this gave to the moment and the scene a certain touch of interest. Apart from this the place was dreary, and the pictures indecent and stupid.

There is much more of interest in the Café of Aristide Bruant, on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Bruant is the modern François Villon. He is the poet of the people, and more especially of the criminal classes. He sings the virtues or the lack of virtue of the several districts of Paris, with the life of which he claims an intimate familiarity. He is the bard of the bully, and of the thief, and of the men who live on the earnings of women. He is unquestionably one of the most picturesque figures in Paris, but his picturesqueness is spoiled in some degree by the evident fact that he is conscious of it. He is a poet, but he is very much more of a poseur.