Bohemian Paris of To-day / Second Edition

by W. C. Morrow; Edward Cucuel

This was the cabaret of the Golden Sun,—all unconscious of the mockery of its name, another of those whimsical disjointings in which the shadowy side of Paris is so prolific. From the interior of the luminary came faintly the notes of a song, with piano accompaniment.

The archway opened into a small court paved with ill-fitted flint blocks. At the farther end of it another gas-lamp flickered at the head of a flight of stairs leading underground. As we approached the steps a woman sprang from the shadow, and with a cry, half of fear and half of anger, fled to the street. At that moment memories of the cosiness of our studio became doubly enticing,—one cannot always approach unfamiliar underground Paris with perfect courage. But Bishop's coolness was reassuring. He had already descended the steps, and there was nothing left for me but to follow.

At the foot of the stairs were half-glass doors curtained with cheap red cloth. A warm, thick, suffocating gust of air, heavy with the fumes of beer, wine, and tobacco, assailed our cold faces as we pushed open the doors and entered the room.

For a moment it was difficult to see clearly, so dense was the smoke. It was packed against the ceiling like a bank of fog, diminishing in density downward, and shot through with long banner-like streamers of smoke freshly emitted.

The human atmosphere of the place could not be caught at once. A stranger would not have known for the moment whether he was with thieves or artists. But very soon its distinctive spirit made its presence and character manifest. The room—which was not a large one—was well filled with an assortment of those queer and interesting people some of whom Bishop had entertained at the studio, only here their characteristics were more pronounced, for they were in their natural element, depressed and hampered by no constraints except of their own devising. A great many were women, although it could be seen at a glance that they were not of the nymphs who flitted among the glittering cafés, gowned in delicate laces and sheeny sculptured silks, the essence of mignonette pervading their environment. No; these were different.

Here one finds, not the student life of Paris, but its most unconventional Bohemian life. Here, in this underground rendezvous, a dirty old hole about twenty feet below the street level, gather nightly the happy-go-lucky poets, musicians, and singers for whom the great busy world has no use, and who, in their unrelaxing poverty, live in the tobacco clouds of their own construction, caring nothing for social canons, obeyers of the civil law because of their scorn of meanness, injustice, and crime, suffering unceasingly for the poorest comforts of life, ambitious without energy, hopeful without effort, cheerful under the direst pressure of need, kindly, simple, proud, and pitiful.

All were seated at little round tables, as are the habitués of the cafés, and their attention was directed upon a slim young fellow with curling yellow hair and a faint moustache, who was singing, leaning meanwhile upon a piano that stood on a low platform in one corner of the room. Their attention was respectful, delicate, sympathetic, and, as might be supposed, brought out the best in the lad. It was evident that he had not long been a member of the sacred circle. His voice was a smooth, velvety tenor, and under proper instruction might have been useful to its possessor as a means of earning a livelihood. But it was clear that he had already fallen under the spell of the associations to which accident or his inclination had brought him; and this meant that henceforth he would live in this strange no-world of dreams, hopes, sufferings, and idleness, and that likely he would in time come to gather cigar-stumps on the sanded pavement of the Café d'Harcourt, and after that sleep with the rats under the bridges of the Seine. At this moment, however, he lived in the clouds; he breathed and glowed with the spirit of shiftless, proud, starving Bohemianism as it is lived in Paris, benignantly disdainful of the great moiling, money-grubbing world that roared around him, and perhaps already the adoration of some girl of poetic or artistic tastes and aspirations, who was serving him as only the Church gives a woman the right.