Briefly, we had seen
the Dead Rat, the Abbey, the Bal Tabarin the Red Mill, Maxim's,
and the rest of the lot to the total number of perhaps ten or
twelve.
We had listened to bad singing, looked on bad dancing,
sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at bad food;
and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths. We
had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris
was just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called
gay life of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life
and gay livers. A scrap of the gristle end of the New York
Tenderloin; a suggestion of a certain part of New Orleans; a short
cross section of the Levee, in Chicago; a dab of the Barbary Coast
of San Francisco in its old, unexpurgated days; a touch of Piccadilly
Circus in London, after midnight, with a top dressing of Gehenna
the Unblest - it had seemed to us a compound of these ingredients,
with a distinctive savor of what was essentially Gallic permeating
through it like garlic through a stew. We had had enough. Even
though we had attended only as onlookers and seekers after local
color, we felt that we had a-plenty of onlooking and entirely too
much of local color; we felt that we should all go into retreat
for a season of self-purification to rid our persons of the one
and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the
other. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that
the evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that
had - so he said - an international reputation for its supposed
sauciness and its real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might
be. Overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed
thither.
This particular cafe was found, in its physical aspects, to be
typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated,
underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas
of stale drink and cheap perfume. As we entered a wrangle was
going on among a group of young Frenchmen picturesquely attired
as art students - almost a sure sign that they were not art students.
An undersized girl dressed in a shabby black-and-yellow frock was
doing a Spanish dance on a cleared space in the middle of the floor.
We knew her instantly for a Spanish dancer, because she had a fan
in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. Another girl,
dressed as a pierrot, was waiting to do her turn when the Spanish
dancer finished. Weariness showed through the lacquer of thick
cosmetic on her peaked little face. An orchestra of three pieces
sawed wood steadily; and at intervals, to prove that these were
gay and blithesome revels, somebody connected with the establishment
threw small, party-colored balls of celluloid about.
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