Not many came by there in the morning, she ventured, but at night it was gay, the cabaret was then crowded she informed me, and leaving me with my _apéritif_ she disappeared through the door leading to the _buvette_.
Upon the walls of the cabaret hung cartoons and crude sketches left in later years by bohemian habitués who made the place their rendezvous.
In a corner stood a piano, its keys yellow with age like the teeth of a horse.
Madame the _patronne_, a slatternly looking woman in a calico wrapper, returns from marketing with two mackerel which she had bargained for from a push-cart in the street below. She led me through a box of a kitchen and showed me a small yard in the rear littered with debris. This she informed me was used as a summer garden in season. She seemed to pride herself upon its attractiveness. I passed an open door of a back room and caught a glimpse of a man leaning over a table, drunk, and unshaven for days. He looked up at me maliciously as I past; then I heard him muttering and swearing in his _argot_ at the girl with the rolled-gold ring.
From the _patronne_ I learned that the cabaret had gone through many changes. It was evident, however, that the general atmosphere had remained the same. It looked all that its title of the Assassins implied. The muddy streets leading to it were unpaved and lighted still by an oil lantern at the corner of the rue St. Vincent, a sinister looking lane flanked by ancient buttressed walls, which kept from sliding into the crooked roadbed old tangled gardens and scattered derelicts of houses.
INTERIOR OF THE CABARET OF THE ASSASSINS]
The rue Tholozé, snaking its way up from the rue Lepic to the ball of the Moulin de la Galette, is purely a hill street. Its gutters are flushed with clear water which flows in miniature torrents. Horses never climb the rue Tholozé, and pedestrians going up to the ball pause at the landing stages for breath. Those living along this mountain highway must needs step out of their residences with their sea legs on, for the declivity which slopes past their doorways resembles somewhat the angle of a promenade deck in a gale. The hill begins to ascend in earnest after you pass the dingy little bohemian restaurant of the Vache Enragée on the rue Lepic, an _intime_ rendezvous of bohemians of the Butte.