Even the kitchen, shining in its well-polished battery of copper saucepans, held its art treasures.
It was nearly dusk when the poet and I took our leave of our charming hostess and the “Villa Polichinelle.”
The clown had been obliged to hurry away earlier to attend some affairs preliminary to the night’s performance.
As the poet and I descended the Butte together, all Paris lay spread out in the evening glow below us.
It lay like a vast gray sea sparkling and phosphorescent with tens of thousands of lights. Far below, away in the twilight, jutted the spires of Notre-Dame; to the right rose the Opéra, square and massive like a tomb.
I thought of Marcelle’s paradise perched in the pure air above the reek and filth that hung like a miasma about the base of the Butte, and what it meant to her as a refuge from the smoke and stifling air of cabarets and cafés-concert.
We kept on through the alleys of streets, zig-zagging our way down the Butte, and turned the corner of the Cabaret des Assassins. A kerosene lamp burned in the greasy kitchen, from the door of which a hag of a woman appeared and screeched at us as we passed:
It was in midwinter one misty morning in January when I revisited the primitive village upon the summit of Montmartre. This time I chose for my trail a back street which led me up to the ancient Cabaret of the Assassins, now known under the name of the Lapin Agil. The cabaret, a squat, sordid two-story structure, stands upon a solitary corner of the Butte, forming an angle with the rue Saint Vincent and the rue des Saules. Overlooking Paris below, a back window glared in the light of the chill morning from beneath an overhanging eave, like the eye of a murderer in hiding. The place as I entered was silent and deserted except for the individuals who kept it.
A girl of fifteen addressed me in a timid voice as I entered the low-ceiled _buvette_ adjoining the cabaret. She wore a massive marriage ring. She seemed somewhat frightened and suspicious, as tho I were a government detective armed with a warrant.
She directed me to a bench in the deserted cabaret, stale with the odor of the night before, and brought me a short glass with a thick bottom. Into this she poured a draft of syrupy vermouth and apologized for the absence of her mother, the _patronne_, who had not yet returned from market.