n. He was the prime
spirit of the little Garibaldi in MacDougal Street of which James L.
Ford wrote in "Bohemia Invaded." Not often did he stray over to
Greenwich Village. He disliked what he called its bourgeois
conservatism.

For a period of years that section immediately to the south of the
Square was the French Quarter. There were the peaceful artisans, and
also there were political refugees of dangerous proclivities, men who
had had a share in the blazing terrors of the Commune, and who, in some
cases, had paid the price in years of imprisonment under the tropical
sun of Cayenne. In all their wanderings they had carried the spirit of
revolution with them and spouted death to despots over their glasses of
absinthe in cellar cafes. William H. Rideing, in an article which was
published in "Scribner's Magazine" for November, 1879, described these
men as he had found them in the Taverne Alsacienne in Greene Street:
"gathered around the tables absorbed in piquet, ecarte, or vingt-et-un
... most of them without coats, the shabbiness of their other garments
lighted up by a brilliant red bandanna kerchief or a crimson overshirt."
Keen glances were shot at strangers, for the tavern had a certain
_clientele_ outside of which it had few customers and suspicion was rife
at any invasion. "They are drinking wine, vermouth, and greenish opaline
draughts of absinthe. Staggering in unnerved and stupefied from the
previous night's debauch, they show few signs of vitality until four or
five glasses of the absinthe have been drunk, and then they awaken;
their eyes brighten and their tongues are loosened--the routine of play,
smoke, and alcohol is resumed."

Pleasanter to recall are the sober, industrious men and women who were
denizens of the neighbourhood in the years gone by--Mademoiselle Berthe
and her little sisters, fabricating roses and violets out of muslin and
wax in their attic apartment, Madame Lange, the _blanchisseuse_, ironing
in front of an open window, Triquet, the _charcutier_, Roux, the
_bottier_, Malvaison, the _marchand de vin_. Then there were others of
the colony, higher in the social scale and less prosperous in their
finances, the impecunious music-teachers and professors of languages who
maintained themselves with a frosty air of shabby gentility on a very
slender income, and the practitioners of literature and art who
maintained themselves somehow on no income at all. For the leisure hours
of these there were