Finally, there are at Montmartre a round half-dozen resorts, _cabarets de la chanson d’argot_ (also called _cabarets brutaux_), of which Bruant’s _Mirliton_, Alexandre’s _Cabaret Bruyant_, and “Buffalo’s” _l’Alouette_ are the most conspicuous examples. They have had their day so far as spontaneity is concerned, like the _cabarets artistiques et littéraires_, though, like them, they still attract foreigners and provincials.
Mercenary and meretricious now to the last degree, however genuine they may have been in the beginning, they still have this much, at least, of sincerity,—namely, cordial detestation of the bourgeois; and it is to this very spirit, strangely enough, that their vogue with the bourgeois has been due.
It was of one of these _cabarets brutaux_ (Bruant’s _Mirliton_, probably) that Zola wrote in _Paris_: “Pleasure-seeking Paris, the _Bourgeoisie_, mistress of money and of power, sickened by their possessions in time, but unwilling to let anything go, flocked thither—to receive insults and obscenities full in the face.... Far more than in the words, the burning insult was in the manner with which the singer cast the words in the teeth of the rich, of the favoured, of the fine ladies who elbowed each other to hear him. Under the low ceiling, amid the smoke of pipes, in the blinding heat of the gas, he launched his verses brutally like _crachats_, a very hail-squall of furious contempt.”
Bruant himself rarely appears nowadays at his _Mirliton_, which, with the aid of under-studies, he, nevertheless, keeps up. Loaded with notoriety and wealth, he has come to prefer following the hounds or emptying a bottle of good wine, as the Châtelain of Courthenay, to entertaining the bourgeois by affronting them.
Not long back Bruant was an unsuccessful candidate for deputy at Belleville, which adjoins Montmartre. His address to his electors—with which it is customary for candidates to placard the walls of their districts—was in rhyme. The verses, though not of his best, are novel enough to demand quotation:—
_de la première conscription du vingtième arrondissement Belleville-Saint-Fargeau_
_Si j’étais votre député, Ohé! Ohé! qu’on se le dise, J’ajouterais “Humanité” Aux trois mots de votre devise ... Au lieu de parler tous les jours Pour la République ou l’Empire Et de faire de longs discours Pour ne rien dire._