The Jardin Mabille.
The day of the Jardin Mabille went by several years yet, but the memories of it remain. The nearest approach to it, at present, is an establishment in the Latin quarter of Paris. The Mabille was a very elaborately and artistically arranged garden, a maze of thickets, odorous with flowers. It had an immense closed hall for winter use. Here once a week was held a masked ball which lasted from Saturday night to daybreak of the Sabbath. The wickedest dances, notably the can-can and the hula-hula, were invariably reserved for the closing hours of the affair. The women who frequented these balls were bad, yes, very bad, and they were met there by men in all walks of life. Even Napoleon III has visited this den of iniquity incognito. The writer of this had occasion to visit the Jardin Mabille and other similar places in Paris once in company with a detective.One of the notable dances seen was the bacchanal or wine dance. It is accompanied with the most astonishing sensational effects. The gas burns low, loud gongs bray dismally, cymbals clash, and the hall is brilliantly illuminated with red and blue and green fires, amongst which pistols are discharged and shrieks are heard in various parts of the room. Never was a madder scene enacted in real life than the bacchanal and the valentine on New Year’s eve. But is it real life after all, or is it only Paris and a kind of giddy dream? We, who come only to look on and to renew our feeble, but I trust virtuous, indignation at such sights, turn at last from the girls in boys’ clothes and the boy in girls’ clothes; from the jaunty sailor girl-boy who has just ridden around the room on the shoulders of her captain; from the Queen of Darkness who swept past us in diamonds and sables and never so much as suffered her languishing eyes to rest for a moment on any one of us; from the misery of the jealous one in the corner who has been robbed of his prize, and the melancholy of the two who are advising one another to go home, for they have each had more than enough; from all this we turn at last and find the streets blank and cold, and over the roofs comes the sound of bells that are calling the faithful to prayer.
As a resort the Jardin Mabille ranked about with the Sixth Avenue dives of New York. The general class of patrons were the same at both. The attractions are the loose women; the attracted the silly, young and old men.
I have encountered there grave American business men and government officials, and famous actresses andprima donnæ, bent on investigating the gilded vice for which the Mabille has become notorious. Indeed, the experience was said to be one without which one’s knowledge of Paris was incomplete, and as long as the Jardin Mabille existed, it never lacked patrons to make its sugared infamy profitable. God be thanked that this vile institution is of the past, and it is our regret that some French Parkhurst does not arise and clean out the similar establishments whose gilded doors are open as the reader is perusing this.
A PAIR OF FRENCH DANCERS.
A PAIR OF FRENCH DANCERS.
A PAIR OF FRENCH DANCERS.