I suggest, however, that we choose a café in the Quarter—not one of the tiny eating-houses like Henriette’s where we lunched, but a full-fledged, prosperous café; frequented by the better-off artists and the upper-class Quarter grisettes. Ten minutes in the Underground lands us at the door of one of the best-known of these places. In the front room, with big windows open to the street, is the café des consommateurs; in the rear, the restaurant and card rooms, and a delightful galleried garden, where also one may dine. Alluring strains of Hoffmann’s Barcarolle entice us thither with all speed; and soon our enthusiasm is divided between chilled slices of golden melon and the caressing sensuousness of the maître d’orchestre’s violin.
In passing, one may note that good music in Paris is a rare quantity. Though many people come to study singing, there are few vocal concerts, and the Touche and the Rouge are the only orchestras of any importance. They give weekly concerts in small halls, hardly bigger than an ordinary-sized room, and the handful of attendants smoke their fat porcelain pipes and extract cherries out of glasses of kirsch, and happily imagine themselves music-lovers. But the great artiste is an artist through sight rather than through sound; and even in opera, where the dramatic element is or should be subservient to the music, the superdramatic French are ill-at-ease and hampered. Some of the performances at the Opéra Comique are delightful, for here the lighter pieces of Massenet and Debussy are given, with the French lilt and dash peculiar to these masters. But, at the Opéra itself, the Wagnerian compositions are poorly conducted, the audience uninterested and uninteresting; and even the beautiful foyer—which, since the famous New Year’s Eve balls have been done away with, knows no longer its former splendours—cannot compensate for the thoroughly dull evening one endures there.
Far happier is one listening to the serenades and intermezzos of the cherubic Alsatian violinist at the Quarter café-restaurant. And, after dinner, he plays solos out in the café proper, for the same absorbed polyglot audience that has listened to him for years. Let us range ourselves in this corner against the wall, between the two American lady artists of masculine tailoring and Kansas voices, and the fierce-mustachioed Czek, mildly amused over a copy of the Rire. Every seat in the big double room is taken now, and we are a varied crew of French bourgeois, Russian, Norwegian, and German students, English and American tourists, Japanese attachés (or so one supposes from their conversation, in excellent French, with our neighbour Czek), and blond and black bearded artists who might be of any nation except the Oriental.
They all know each other, and are exchanging jokes and cigarettes over their café crême—which they drink, by the way, out of glass tumblers—and paying goodnaturedly for a bock for Suzanne or Madeleine, whose bocks some other person should be paying. The room has taken on the look of a big family party, some talking, some writing letters, others reading from the shiny black-covered comic papers; all smoking, and sipping absently now and then from their steaming glasses or little verres de liqueur. The music drifts in soothingly, between spurts of conversation, and one is conscious of utter contentment and well-being.
Suddenly a door is flung open. In whirls a small hurricane, confined within a royal purple coat and skirt; gives one lightning glance round the circle of surprised merry-makers, and with a triumphant cry pounces on Suzanne yonder, with the fury of a young virago. “So!” pants the vixen, shaking poor Suzanne. “So you thought to outwit me, you thought to oust me, did you? Me, whom he knew six months before ever he saw you—me whom he took to Havre, to Fontainebleau, to—to—traitress! Coward! Scélérate! Take that—and that—and that!”
She slaps Suzanne soundly on both cheeks; Suzanne pulls her hat off—each makes a lunge at the other’s hair. “Mesdames, mesdames,” cries the patron, hurrying forward. “Je vous en prie—and monsieur,” reproachfully, “can you do nothing?”
Monsieur—the monsieur who kindly, and quite disinterestedly, paid Suzanne’s book—sits by, lazily tapping his fingers against the glass. “What would you?” he says, with a shrug. “Women—” another shrug—“one had as well let them finish it.”
But the patron is by no means of this mind. He begins telling those ladies that his house is a serious house; that his clients are of the most serious, that he himself absolutely demands and insists upon seriousness; and that if these ladies cannot tranquillize themselves instantly——
But of a sudden he halts—pulled up short by the abrupt halt of the ladies themselves. In the thick of the fray Suzanne has flung contemptuous explanation; Gaby, the virago, has caught it. A truce is declared. Curt conversation takes place. Monsieur, still lazily tapping, consents to confirm the defendant’s statement as fact. Gaby, though still suspicious, consents to restore the hated rival’s hat; and in ten minutes the three are tranquilly discussing Cubism and a new round of demi-brunes. The audience, who have gazed on the entire comedy with keen but quite impartial interest, shrug their shoulders, light fresh cigarettes, and return to their papers and pens. Since the first start of surprise, there has not been a murmur among them; only complete concentration on the drama, which the next minute they as completely forget.
There are a dozen such scenes a day, in one’s wandering about Paris; that is, a dozen scenes as sudden, as intense, and as quickly over. The everyday life of the people is so vivid, of such swift and varied contrast, that the theatre itself, to satisfy them, must overreach into melodrama before it rouses. I believe that no other city in the world, unless it be the next most dramatic, New York, could support a theatre like the Grand Guignol for example. I have seen there, in one evening, gruesomely realistic representations of a plague scene in India; the destruction of a submarine, with all the crew on board; and the operating-room of a hospital, where a woman is unnecessarily murdered to pay the surgeon’s wife’s hat bill.