off from another entertainment as
characteristic--as _fin-de-siecle_, the Englishman under the impression
that he knew his Paris would have classified it--nor did we want to be
let off, though it lured us indoors.

The big theatres had no attraction: to sit out a long play in a hot
playhouse was not our idea of what spring nights were made for. Neither
had the "Hells" and "Heavens," the fatuous, vulgar, indecent
performances with catchpenny names, run for the foreigner who went to
Paris so that he might for the rest of his life throw up hands of
horror and say what an immoral place it was.

Once or twice we tried the out-door _Cafe-Chantant_, and we heard Paulus
in the days when all Paris went to hear him, and Yvette Guilbert when
she was still slim and wore the V-shaped bodice and the long black
gloves, as you may see her in Toulouse-Lautrec's lithographs.

Once or twice we tried the big stuffy music-halls, also adapted to
supply the travelling student of morals with the specimens he was in
search of, but not dropping all local character in the effort. We seemed
to owe it to the memory of Manet to go to the _Folies-Bergere_ which
cannot be forgotten so long as his extraordinary painting of the barmaid
in the ugly fashions of the late Seventies is saved to the world. That
natural desire of youth just to see and to know, that had carried us up
and down the _Boulevards_ of the _Rive Gauche_ in pursuit of its poets,
sent us to the _Casino de Paris_ and the _Moulin Rouge_. But a first
visit did not inspire us with a desire for a second, though I would not
have missed the _Casino_ if only for the imperishable memory of the most
solemn of our critics dancing there with a patroness of the house and
looking about as cheerful as a martyr at the stake, nor the _Moulin_
_Rouge_ for another memory as imperishable of the most socially
pretentious leaving his partner, after his dance, with the "thanks
awfully" of the provincial ball-room. I thought both dull places which
nothing save their reputation could have recommended, even to those
determined young decadents in London who were no prouder of their
friendship with Bibi and Verlaine than of their freedom of the French
music-halls, and who wrote of them with a pretence of profound knowledge
calculated to _epater le bourgeois_ at home, referring by name with easy
familiarity to the dancers in the _Quadrille Naturaliste_, as celebrated
in its way as Bibi in his, and explaining sole