e, and Celeste, and Marcelle, and the two Frenchmen, and
the girl in the bicycle clothes, start for Jack Thompson's studio in the
rue des Fourneaux, where there is a piano that, even if the candles in
the little Louis XVI brackets do burn low and spill down the keys, and
the punch rusts the strings, it will still retain that beautiful, rich
tone that every French upright, at seven francs a month, possesses.

[Illustration: (Bullier)]

CHAPTER III

THE "BAL BULLIER"

There are all types of "bals" in Paris. Over in Montmartre, on the Place
Blanche, is the well-known "Moulin Rouge," a place suggestive, to those
who have never seen it, of the quintessence of Parisian devil-me-care
gaiety. You expect it to be like those clever pen-and-ink drawings of
Grevin's, of the old Jardin Mabille in its palmiest days, brilliant with
lights and beautiful women extravagantly gowned and bejeweled. You
expect to see Frenchmen, too, in pot-hats, crowding in a circle about
Fifine, who is dancing some mad can-can, half hidden in a swirl of point
lace, her small, polished boots alternately poised above her dainty
head. And when she has finished, you expect her to be carried off to
supper at the Maison Doree by the big, fierce-looking Russian who has
been watching her, and whose victoria, with its spanking team--black and
glossy as satin--champing their silver bits outside, awaiting her
pleasure.

But in all these anticipations you will be disappointed, for the famous
Jardin Mabille is no more, and the ground where it once stood in the
Champs Elysees is now built up with private residences. Fifine is gone,
too--years ago--and most of the old gentlemen in pot-hats who used to
watch her are buried or about to be. Few Frenchmen ever go to the
"Moulin Rouge," but every American does on his first night in Paris, and
emerges with enough cab fare to return him to his hotel, where he
arrives with the positive conviction that the red mill, with its slowly
revolving sails, lurid in crimson lights, was constructed especially for
him. He remembers, too, his first impressions of Paris that very morning
as his train rolled into the Gare St. Lazare. His aunt could wait until
to-morrow to see the tomb of Napoleon, but he would see the "Moulin
Rouge" first, and to be in ample time ordered dinner early in his
expensive, morgue-like hotel.

I remember once, a few hours after my arrival in Paris, walking up the
long hill to the Place Blanche at 2 P.