whose work we had been arguing all day at
the _Salon_ and buying in the reproductions at the bookstalls and
bookshops on the way back.

To see that performance upstairs we had each to pay five francs at the
door, and we paid them as willingly as if they did not represent
breakfast and dinner for the next day, and so many other people paid
them with equal willingness that the room was crowded, though the show
was of a kind that the same public in any town except Paris would have
paid twice that sum to stay away from. Imagine Poe attracting customers
for a New York saloon-keeper by reciting his poems! Imagine Keene or
Beardsley making the fortunes of a London public-house by decorating
its walls and showing his pictures on a screen! Or imagine the public of
to-day, debauched by the "movies" and the music-hall "sketch," knowing
that there is such a thing as poetry or art to listen to and look at!

But Salis,--the great Salis, inventor, proprietor, director of the _Chat
Noir_, dealt only in poetry and art and music, and this is sufficient to
give him a place in the history of the period, even if he were the mere
exploiter filling his pockets by pilfering other people's brains that he
was accused of being by his enemies. He crowded his _cafe_ by letting
poets whom nobody had heard of and whose destiny--some of them, Maurice
Donnay for one--as staid Academicians nobody could have foreseen, try
their verses for the first time in public; by giving the same splendid
opportunity to musicians as obscure then, whatever heights at least
two--Charpentier and Debussy--were afterwards to reach; and by allowing
the artist, while the poet was the interpreter in beautiful words and
the musician in beautiful sound, to show his wonderful little dramas in
black-and-white, the _Ombres Chinoises_ that were the crowning glory of
the night's performance. From days in the _Salons_, from the illustrated
papers and magazines and books we filled our bags with to take back to
London, we could not measure the full powers of men like Willette and
Caran d'Ache and Riviere and Louis Morin until we had seen also _The
Prodigal Son_, _The March of the Stars_, and all the stories they told
in those dramatic silhouettes--those marvellous little black figures,
cut in tin, only a few inches high, moving across a white space small in
due proportion, but so designed and posed and grouped by the artist as
to give the swing and the movement and the passing of grea