“_One would believe himself more than two hundred miles from Paris._”]
In sum, the Butte, the real Montmartre, seems at first view to be one-half country village and one-half large provincial town. In the rue St. Vincent, the rue Mont-Cénis, the rue des Saules, rue de la Fontaine-du-But, rue de la Borne, rue St. Rustique, rue Norvins, and rue de l’Abreuvoir, where one is scarcely a twenty minutes’ walk from the Grands-Boulevards, one would believe himself more than two hundred miles from the metropolis,—so different are these streets from the average metropolitan ways,—were it not for the constant outlooks on Paris spread out beneath one, for the large proportion of Angoras among the ubiquitous cats, and the phenomenal _savoir-vivre_, good-nature, and friendliness of the dogs; were it not for an indefinable coquetry, tell-tale of Parisianism, about the little garden-girdled houses and a hundred artistic whimsicalities, such as are represented by a windmill studio and a tram-car dwelling; were it not also that certain vistas are closed by the flippant entrance to the _Moulin de la Galette_, that sundry glimpses of studio interiors are vouchsafed, and that silhouettes of long-haired, capering artists and of artists’ models loom up fitfully against the sky; and were there not a sort of vagabond humour in the very atmosphere that accords ill with provincial straight-lacedness.
As the Butte wears the general aspect of a provincial community, so it has the provincial community’s spirit of neighbourliness; but, as its provincial aspect is enlivened by coquetry and mirth, so its provincial neighbourliness is happily modified by being shorn of the meddling spirit. The _Montmartrois_ is not indifferent to the welfare of his fellow-_Montmartrois_; but he minds his own business, which the neighbourly provincial rarely, if ever, does. He is as willing as the most naïve countryman to lend a helping hand upon occasion; but, the occasion passed, he speedily effaces himself. He does not feel entitled to enter into your intimacy, to summer and winter with you, so to say, because he has done you a casual good turn.
When I entered Montmartre, as most fellows enter it, with my _lares and penates_ enthroned on a hand-cart, and experienced the difficulty other fellows, thus encumbered, have experienced in scaling the Butte, a butcher’s boy and an artist who was sketching in the street were prompt to put their shoulders to the wheel (to the tail-board, to be strictly accurate); but they did not by the same token cross-question me regarding my antecedents and intentions, as countrymen, in the same circumstances, would have done. They gracefully accepted my invitation to a social glass at an adjacent wine-shop, then went their ways to their respective tasks; and that was the end of it.