FullReads

But it wasn’t a bag-pipe at all. That we discovered when we entered the room, after passing through the bar in the front. The bal was conducted in a large hall at the back of the maison. In the doorway lounged an agent de service, always a guest at one of these functions, I found out later. There were rows of tables, long tables, with long wooden benches placed between them. One corner of the floor was cleared–not so large a corner either–for dancing, and on a small platform sat the strangest looking youth, like Peter Pan never to grow old, like the Monna Lisa a boy of a thousand years, without emotion or expression of any sort. He was playing an accordion; the bag-pipe, symbol of the bal, hung disused on the wall over his head. His accordion, manipulated with great skill, was augmented by sleigh-bells attached to his ankles in such a manner that a minimum of movement produced a maximum of effect; he further added to the complexity of sound and rhythm by striking a cymbal occasionally with one of his feet. The music was both rhythmic and ordered, now a waltz, now a tune in two-four time, but never faster or slower, and never ending … except in the middle of each dance, for a brief few seconds, while the patronne collected a sou from each dancer, after which the dance proceeded. All the time we remained never did the musician smile, except twice, once briefly when I sent word to him by the waiter to order a consommation and once, at some length, when we departed. On these occasions the effect was almost emotionally illuminating, so inexpressive was the ordinary cast of his features. A strange lad; I like to think of him always sitting there, passively, playing the accordion and shaking his sleigh-bells. He suggested a static picture, a thing of always, but I know it is not so, for even the next summer he had disappeared along with the bal and now he may have been shot in the Battle of the Marne or he may have murdered his gigolette and been transported to one of the French penal colonies…. An apache, en musicien!… black cloth around his throat, hair parted in the middle, velours trousers; a vrai apache I tell you, a cool, cunning creature, shredded with cocaine and absinthe, monotonous in his virtuosity, playing the accordion. He had begun before we arrived and he continued after we left. I like to think of him as always playing, but it is not so….

As for the dancers, they were of various kinds and sorts. The women had that air which gave them the stamp of a quarter; they wore loose blouses, tucked in plaid skirts, or dark blue skirts, or multi-coloured calico skirts (if you have seen the lithographs of Steinlen you may reconstruct the picture with no difficulty) and they danced in that peculiar fashion so much in vogue in the Northern outskirts of Paris. The men seized them tightly and they whirled to the inexorable music when it was a waltz, whirled and whirled, until one thought of the Viennese and how they become as dervishes and Japanese mice when one plays Johann Strauss. But in the dances in two-four time their way was more our way, something between a one-step, a mattchiche, and a tango, with strange fascinating steps of their own devising, a folk-dance manner…. Yes, under their feet, the dance became a real dance of the people and, when we entered into it, our feet seemed heavy and our steps conventional, although we tried to do what they did. (How they did laugh at us!) And the strange youth emphasized the effect of folk-dancing by playing old chansons de France which he mingled with his repertory of cafe-concert airs. And there was achieved that wonderful thing (to an artist) a mixture of genres –intriguing one’s curiosity, awakening the most dormant interest, and inspiring the dullest imagination.