,
sitting at a small table facing the somewhat vivid mural decoration
which runs the length of one wall, drinking my brown _bock_, I have
remembered the story which Mary Garden once told me, how Albert Carre
to celebrate the hundredth--or was it the twenty-fifth?--performance
of _Louise_, gave a dinner there--so near to the scenes he had
conceived--to Charpentier and how, surrounded by some of the most
notable musicians and poets of France, the composer had suddenly
fallen from the table, face downwards; he had starved himself so long
to complete his masterpiece that food did not seem to nourish him. It
was the end of a brilliant dinner. He was carried away ... to the
Riviera; some said that he had lost his mind; some said that he was
dying. Mary Garden herself did not know, at the time she first sang
_Louise_ in America, what had happened to him. But a little later the
rumour that he was writing a trilogy was spread about and soon it was
a known fact that at least one other part of the trilogy had been
written, _Julien_; that lyric drama was produced and everybody knows
the story of its failure. Charpentier, the natural philosopher and the
poet of Montmartre, had said everything he had to say in _Louise_. As
for the third play, one has heard nothing about that yet.

But on this evening the Moulin de la Galette was closed and then I
remembered that it was open on Thursday and this was Wednesday. Is it
Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday that the Moulin de la Galette is open?
I think so. By this time we were determined to dance; but where? We
had no desire to go to some stupid place, common to tourists, no such
place as the Bal Tabarin lured us; nor did the Grelot in the Place
Blanche, for we had been there a night or two before. The Elysee
Montmartre (celebrated by George Moore) would be closed. Its _patron_
followed the schedule of days adopted for the Galette.... To chance I
turn in such dilemmas.... I consulted a small boy, who, with his
companion, had been good enough to guide us through many winding
streets to the Moulin. Certainly he knew of a _bal_. Would _monsieur_
care to visit a _bal musette_? His companion was horrified. I caught
the phrase "_mal frequente_." Our curiosity was aroused and we gave
the signal to advance.

There were two grounds for my personal curiosity beyond the more
obvious ones. I seemed to remember to have read somewhere that the
ladies of the court of Louis XIV played the _musette_, which is