A CAFÉ CHANTANT
The Parisian may economize in household matters, in the question of another egg for his breakfast, and in the turning of an uneaten entrée into a soup, but in public he is most generous; and he is in nothing so generous as in his reckless use of gas. He raises ten lamp-posts to every one that is put up in London or New York, and he does not plant them only to light some thing or some person, but because they are pleasing to look at in themselves. It is difficult to feel gloomy in a city which is so genuinely illuminated that one can sit in the third-story window of a hotel and read a newspaper by the glare of the gas-lamps in the street below. This is a very wise generosity, for it helps to attract people to Paris, who spend money there, so that in the end the lighting of the city may be said to pay for itself. If we had as good government in New York as there is in Paris, Madison Square would not depend for its brilliancy at night on the illuminated advertising of two business firms.
Individuals follow the municipality of Paris in this extravagance, and the Ambassadeurs' is in consequence as brilliant as many rows of gas-jets can make it, and these globes of white light among the green branches of the trees are one of the prettiest effects on the Champs Élysées at night. They do not turn night into day, but they make the darkness itself more attractive by contrast. The performers at the Ambassadeurs' are the best in their line of work, and the audiences are composed of what in London would be called the middle class, mixed with cocottes and boulevardiers. You will also often see American men and women who are well known at home dining there on the balcony, but they do not bring young girls with them.
It is interesting to note what pleases French people of the class who gather at these open-air concerts. What is artistic they seem to appreciate much more fully than would an American or an English audience—at least, they are more demonstrative in their applause; but the contradictory feature of their appreciation lies in their delight and boisterous enthusiasm, not only over what is very good, but also over what is most childish horse-play. They enjoy with equal zest the quiet, inimitable character studies of Nicolle and the efforts of two trained dogs to play upon a fiddle, while a hideous, gaunt creature, six foot tall, in a woman's ballet costume, throws them off their chairs in convulsions of delight. They are like children with a mature sense of the artistic, and still with an infantile delight in what is merely noisy and absurd.
It is also interesting to note how much these audiences will permit from the stage in the direction of suggestiveness, and what would be called elsewhere "outraged propriety." This is furnished them to the highest degree by Yvette Guilbert. It seems that as this artist became less of a novelty, she recognized that it would be necessary for her to increase the audacity of her songs if she meant to hold her original place in the interest of her audiences, and she has now reached a point in daring which seems hardly possible for her or any one else to pass. No one can help delighting in her and in her line of work, in her subtlety, her grace, and the absolute knowledge she possesses of what she wants to do and how to do it. But her songs are beyond anything that one finds in the most impossible of French novels or among the legends of the Viennese illustrated papers. These latter may treat of certain subjects in a too realistic or in a scoffing but amusing manner, but Guilbert talks of things which are limited generally to the clinique of a hospital and the blague of medical students; things which are neither funny, witty, nor quaint, but simply nasty and offensive. The French audiences of the open-air concerts, however, enjoy these, and encore her six times nightly. At Pastor's Theatre last year a French girl sang a song which probably not one out of three hundred in the audience understood, but which she delivered with such appropriateness of gesture as to make her meaning plain. When she left the stage there was absolute silence in the house, and in the wings the horrified manager seized her by the arms, and in spite of her protests refused to allow her to reappear. So her performance in this country was limited to that one song. It was a very long trip to take for such a disappointment, and the management were, of course, to blame for not knowing what they wanted and what their audiences did not want, but the incident is interesting as showing how widely an American and a French audience differs in matters of this sort.
There was another Frenchwoman who appeared in New York last winter, named Duclerc. She is a very beautiful woman, and very popular in Paris, and I used to think her amusing at the Ambassadeurs', where she appealed to a sympathetic audience; but in a New York theatre she gave you a sense of personal responsibility that sent cold shivers down your back, and you lacked the courage to applaud, when even the gallery looked on with sullen disapproval. And when the Irish comedian who followed her said that he did not understand her song, but that she was quite right to sing it under an umbrella, there was a roar of relief from the audience which showed it wanted some one to express its sentiments, which it had been too polite to do except in silence. This tolerance impressed me very much, especially because I had seen the same woman suffer at the hands of her own people, whom she had chanced to offend. The incident is interesting, perhaps, as showing that the French have at times not only the child's quick delight, but also the cruelty of a child, than which there is nothing more unreasoning and nothing more savage.
