[Illustration: SOME YOUNG PEOPLE OF MONTMARTRE]
But whatever may have been true of the spirit of Paris then, the man who visits it to-day expecting to see Leech's illustrations and Mark Twain's description of the Mabille reproduced in the Jardin de Paris and the Moulin Rouge will be disappointed. He will, on the contrary, find a great deal of light and some very good music, and a mixed crowd composed chiefly of young women and Frenchmen well advanced in years and English and American tourists. The young women have all the charm that only a Frenchwoman possesses, and parade quietly below the boxes, and before the rows of seats that stretch around the hall or the garden, as it happens to be, and are much better behaved and infinitely more self-respecting and attractive in appearance than the women of their class in London or New York. But there are no students nor grisettes to kick off high hats and to dance in an ecstasy of abandon. There are in their places from four to a dozen ugly women and shamefaced-looking men, who are hired to dance, and who go sadly through the figures of the quadrille, while one of the women after another shows how high she can kick, and from what a height she can fall on the asphalt, and do what in the language of acrobats is called a "split;" there is no other name for it. It is not an edifying nor thrilling spectacle.
The most notorious of these dance-halls is the Moulin Rouge. You must have noticed when journeying through France the great windmills that stand against the sky-line on so many hilltops. They are a picturesque and typical feature of the landscape, and seem to signify the honest industry and primitiveness of the French people of the provinces. And as the great arms turn in the wind you can imagine you can hear the sound of the mill-wheel clacking while the wheels inside grind out the flour that is to give life and health. And so when you see the great Red Mill turn high up where four streets meet on the side of Montmartre, and know its purpose, you are impressed with the grim contrast of its past uses and its present notoriety. An imaginative person could not fail to be impressed by the sight of the Moulin Rouge at night. It glows like a furnace, and the glare from its lamps reddens the sky and lights up the surrounding streets and cafés and the faces of the people passing like a conflagration. The mill is red, the thatched roof is red, the arms are picked out in electric lights in red globes, and arches of red lamp-shades rise on every side against the blackness of the night. Young men and women are fed into the blazing doors of the mill nightly, and the great arms, as they turn unceasingly and noisily in a fiery circle through the air, seem to tell of the wheels within that are grinding out the life and the health and souls of these young people of Montmartre.