Bruant is assisted in the entertainment of his guests by two or three young men who sing his songs, the others in the room joining with them. Every third number is sung by the great man himself, swaggering up and down the narrow limits of the place, with his hands sunk deep in the pockets of his coat, and his head rolling on his shoulders. At the end of each verse he withdraws his hands, and brushes his hair back over his ears, and shakes it out like a mane. One of his perquisites as host is the privilege of saluting all of the women as they leave, of which privilege he avails himself when they are pretty, or resigns it and bows gravely when they are not. It is amusing to notice how the different women approach the door when it is time to go, and how the escort of each smiles proudly when the young man deigns to bend his head over the lips of the girl and kiss her good-night.
The café of the Black Cat is much finer and much more pretentious than Bruant's shop, and is of wider fame. It is, indeed, of an entirely different class, but it comes in here under the head of the show-places of Paris at night. It was originally a sort of club where journalists and artists and poets met round the tables of a restaurant-keeper who happened to be a patron of art as well, and fitted out his café with the canvases of his customers, and adopted their suggestions in the arrangement of its decoration. The outside world of Paris heard of these gatherings at the Black Cat, as the café and club were called, and of the wit and spirit of its _habitués_, and sought admittance to its meetings, which was at first granted as a great privilege. But at the present day the café has been turned over into other hands, and is a show-place pure and simple, and a most interesting one. The café proper is fitted throughout with heavy black oak, or something in imitation of it. There are heavy broad tables and high wainscoting and an immense fireplace and massive rafters.
To set off the sombreness of this, the walls are covered with panels in the richest of colors, by Steinlen, the most imaginative and original of the Parisian illustrators, in all of which the black cat appears as a subject, but in a different rôle and with separate treatment. Upon one panel hundreds of black cats race over the ocean, in another they are waltzing with naiads in the woods, and in another they are whirling through space over red-tiled roofs, followed by beautiful young women, gendarmes, and boulevardiers in hot pursuit. And in every other part of the café the black cat appears as frequently as did the head of Charles I. in the writings of Mr. Dick. It stalks stuffed in its natural skin, or carved in wood, with round glass eyes and long red tongue, or it perches upon the chimney-piece with back arched and tail erect, peering down from among the pewter pots and salvers. The gas-jets shoot from the mouths of wrought-iron cats, and the dismembered heads of others grin out into the night from the stained-glass windows. The room shows the struggle for what is odd and bizarre, but the drawings in black and white and the watercolors and oil-paintings on the walls are signed by some of the cleverest artists in Paris. The inscriptions and rules and regulations are as odd as the decorations. As, for example, the one placed halfway up the narrow flight of stairs which leads to the tiny theatre, and which commemorates the fact that the café was on such a night visited by President Carnot, who--so the inscription adds, lest the visitor should suppose the Black Cat was at all impressed by the honor--"is the successor of Charlemagne and Napoleon I." Another fancy of the Black Cat was at one time to dress all the waiters in the green coat and gold olive leaves of the members of the Institute, to show how little the poets and artists of the café thought of the other artists and poets who belonged to that ancient institution across the bridges. But this has now been given up, either because the uniforms proved too expensive, or because some one of the Black Cat's _habitués_ had left his friends "for a ribbon to wear in his coat," and so spoiled the satire.