he threshold of
fame or oblivion. And if in an access of conscientiousness we had felt
the need--as we never did--of a reason for our eagerness, we might have
had it in the way our evening's entertainment invariably turned out to
be the legitimate sequel of our day's work. For there wasn't a _cabaret_
of them all that did not reflect somehow the things we had been busy
studying and wrangling over ever since our arrival in Paris, the merit
they shared in common being their pre-occupation with the art and
literature of the day to which they belonged. The tiresome performance
known as a _Revue_, which is all the vogue just now in the London
music-halls, undertakes to do something of the same kind: to be, that
is, a reflection of the events and interests and popular excitements of
the day. But the wide gulf between the music-hall _Revue_ and the old
_Cabaret_ performance is that art and literature could not, by hook or
by crook, be dragged into the average Englishman's scheme of life.

If one night the end of the journey was the _Treteau de Tabarin_--the
hot and uncomfortable little room rigged up as a theatre, with hard
rough wooden benches for the audience, and vague lights, and bare and
dingy stage where men and women whose names I have forgotten read and
recited and sang the _chansons rosses_ that "all Paris" flocked there to
hear--it was to have the argument from which we had freshly come
continued and settled by one of the inspired young poets. For my chief
remembrance is of the irreverent youth who summed up our daily dispute
over Rodin's great melodramatic Balzac, with frowning brows and goitrous
throat, wrapped in shapeless dressing-gown, that stood that spring in
the centre of the sculpture court at the New _Salon_, and the summing up
was in verse only a Frenchman could write, the satire the more bitter
because the wit was so fine.

A second night when we climbed the lumbering omnibus, we were bound for
the _Chat Noir_. It had already moved from its first primitive quarters
but had not yet degenerated into a regular show place, advertised in
Paris and taken by Salis on tour through the provinces. Here, our
justification was to find that everything, from the sign of the Black
Cat, then hanging at the door and now hanging, a national possession, in
the Carnavalet Museum, and the cat-decorations in the _cafe_ and the
drawings and paintings on the wall, to the performance in the big room
upstairs, was by the men over