wineshop, the front of which was bordered with
black, like a letter announcing a death, and which bore, grating as it
swung at the end of an iron rod, a red lantern for a sign.

His little girls, when he laughingly spoke of the cabaret where the
waiters were dressed like undertakers' assistants, turned pale, and
plump little Mme. Bernardet, ordinarily smiling, would say with a sigh:
"Is it possible that such sacrilegious things are permitted in the
quarter?"

Bernardet good-naturedly replied: "Ah, my dear, where is the harm?"

"I know what I am talking about," his good wife said; "they are the
pleasure of the unhealthy minded. They mock at death as they mock at
everything else. Where will it all end? We shall see it"----

"Or we shall not see it," interrupted her husband, laughingly.

He went in there one evening, having a little time to himself, as he
would have gone into a theatre. He knew something about this Cabaret du
Squelette (meaning the wine shop of the skeleton). He found the place
very droll.

A small hall which had a few months before been a common wine shop had
been transformed into a lugubrious place. The walls were painted a dead
black, and were hung with a large number of paintings--scenes from
masked balls, gondola parades, serenades with a balcony scene, some of
the lovers' rendezvous of Venice and an ideal view of Granada, with
couples gazing at each other and sighing in the gondolas on the lagoons,
or in the Andalusian courts--and in this strange place with its romantic
pictures, souvenirs of Musset or of Carlo Gozzi, the tables were made in
the form of coffins with lighted candles standing upon them, and the
waiters were dressed as undertakers' assistants, with shiny black hats
trimmed with crape, on their heads.

"What poison will you drink before you die?" asked one of the creatures
of Bernardet.

Bernardet sat and gazed about him. A few "high-flyers" from the other
side of Paris were there. Here and there a thief from that quarter sat
alone at a table. Some elegants in white cravats, who had come there in
correct evening dress, were going later, after the opera, to sup with
some premiere. The police officer understood very well why the blase
came there. They wished to jog their jaded appetites; they sought to
find some _piment_, a curry, spice to season the tameness of their daily
existence. The coffin-shaped tables upon which they leaned their elbows
amused them. Several of them had as