t armies until
one could almost fancy one heard the drums beat and the trumpets call,
or to suggest the grandeur and solemnity of the desert, the vastness of
the sky, the mystery of the night. They have been imitated. Only a few
months ago I saw an imitation in a London music-hall, with all that late
inventions in photography and electric light could do for it. But no
touch of genius was in the little figures and the elaboration was no
more than clever stagecraft. The simplicity of the _Chat Noir_ was gone,
and gone the gaiety of the performers, and the pretence of gaiety is
sadder than tragedy. Salis knew how to catch his poet, his musician, his
artist, young,--that is where he scored.

It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show
because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its
British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more
to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their
wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone
there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British
belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day
the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to
cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to
accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a
woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own
front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for
her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon
whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send
her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the
course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination
herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary
local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not
have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to
be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could
see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears
for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression
of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_,
refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of
it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her
cigarette cas