Suitably chaperoned
by a trio of transplanted Americans who knew a good bit about the
Paris underworld I rode over miles of bumpy cobblestones until,
along about four o'clock in the morning, our taxicab turned into
a dim back street opening off one of the big public markets and
drew up in front of a grimy establishment rejoicing in the happy
and we1l-chosen name of the Cave of the Innocents.
Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy
woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen,
and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the
foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side
on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to
caress their goatees and finger their swords. Whether the gendarmes
were stationed here to keep the Apaches from preying on the marketmen
or the marketmen from preying on the Apaches I know not; but having
subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that selfsame market I
should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police
protection it was the Apaches. My money would be on the marketmen
every time.
Beyond the couchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage
cut out of stone and so came at length to what seemingly had
originally been a winevault, hollowed out far down beneath the
foundations of the building. The ceiling was so low that a tall
man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off. The place was full
of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and
had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever
since. For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked
old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed
in a perpetual snarl. I judged some of its most important vital
organs were missing too - after I heard it played. On the walls
were inscribed such words as naughty little boys write on schoolhouse
fences in this country, and more examples of this pleasing brand
of literature were carved on the whittled oak benches and the
rickety wooden stools. So much for the physical furbishings.
By rights - by all the hallowed rules and precedents of the American
vaudeville stage! - the denizens of this cozy retreat in the bowels
of the earth should have been wearing high-waisted baggy velvet
trousers and drinking absinthe out of large flagons, and stabbing
one another between the shoulder blades, and ever and anon, in the
mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack-the-whip with the necks
and heels of their adoring lady friends; but such was not found
to be the case. In all these essential and traditional regards
the assembled Innocents were as poignantly disappointing as the
costers of London had proved themselves.
According to all the printed information on the subject the London
coster wears clothes covered up with pearl buttons and spends his
time swapping ready repartee with his Donah or his Dinah. The
costers I saw were barren of pearl buttons and silent of speech;
and almost invariably they had left their Donahs at home. Similarly
these gentlemen habitues of the Cave of the Innocents wore few or
no velvet pants, and guzzled little or none of the absinthe. Their
favorite tipple appeared to be beer; and their female companions
snuggled closely beside them.
We stayed among them fully twenty minutes, but not a single person
was stabbed while we were there. It must have been an off-night
for stabbings.
Still, I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here,
for the first, last and only time in Paris, I found a shop where
a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with
vociferous enthusiasm. The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled
on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner.
The waiter, though, bowed before us - a shockheaded personage in
the ruins of a dress suit - at the same time saying words which I
took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that
he had called us something that might be freely translated as a
certain kind of female lobster. Circumscribed by our own inflexible
and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with
calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes
further than that - he calls you a female lobster, which seems
somehow or other to make it more binding.
However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately
offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which
for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside
the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that
all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World
was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was,
for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself
down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has
liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious - that
was what ailed him.
For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of
grave peril. It was no use. I felt safe - not exactly comfortable,
but perfectly safe. I could not even muster up a spasm of the
spine when a member of our party leaned over and whispered in my
ear that any one of these gentry roundabout us would cheerfully
cut a man's throat for twenty-five cents. I was surprised, though,
at the moderation of the cost; this was the only cheap thing I had
struck in Paris. It was cheaper even than the same job is supposed
to be in the district round Chatham Square, on the East Side of
New York, where the credulous stranger so frequently is told that
he can have a plain murder done for five dollars - or a fancy
murder, with trimmings, for ten; rate card covering other jobs on
application.
