“All of a sudden the Haussmannising empire bound it to Paris by the Boulevard Magenta, and the picks of the workmen have had no respite since.”
The Eighteenth Arrondissement, which corresponds roughly with Montmartre, has nearly doubled in population since the Franco-Prussian war, and is now a city of more than 225,000 souls.
“Travellers tell us,” wrote Aurélien Scholl in 1898, “that in America cities spring up with incredible rapidity.... I know only two localities in France which have undergone a similar speedy transformation,—Royan[95] and Montmartre. It is not so very long ago that we saw from the boulevards looking up the rue Laffitte a verdant _butte_ with a few windmills whose arms enlivened the perspective. There were hovels and tiny, shabby-looking shops along the present boulevards (Clichy and Rochechouart).
“Montmartre is to-day one of the finest cities of France. It has three theatres, five or six _cafés-concerts_, a circus, restaurants, and _brasseries_.... _La cigale_ sings there all summer—and all winter.”
In the partial eyes of the loyal _Montmartrois_, Montmartre, “_Ville Libre_,” literary and artistic Bohemia _par excellence_, is as much the capital of Paris[96] as Paris is the capital of France. To them all the rest of Paris, the Latin Quarter included, is merely Montmartre’s back yard.
Montmartre, by reason of its surpassing view, has always been favoured as a place of residence by detached writers and artists; and, after the closing of the _Théâtre Bobino_ in the _Quartier Latin_, a perceptible literary and artistic current thitherward set in. But it was the exodus of the “_Hydropathes_” and “_Hirsutes_” of the _Quartier_ to the _Chat Noir_ that marked (marked rather than caused) the real beginning of Montmartre’s supremacy.
The _Cercle des Hydropathes_[97] owed its origin to one Charles Cros, who, tiring of being relegated to an inglorious obscurity while Coquelin _Cadet_ won laurels by the recitation of monologues, which he (Cros) had written, decided to recite his monologues himself.
The first formal meeting of the _Hydropathes_ was held on a Friday of October, 1878, in a small upper room of a Latin Quarter café, corner of the rue Cujas and the Boulevard St. Michel. There were five persons present. At the next meeting there were seventy-five, at the third one hundred, at the fourth one hundred and fifty, and so on, until, driven from café to café by the need of more room, they settled in a vacant store, with an average attendance of three hundred to three hundred and fifty twice a week.