_Le Conservatoire_ (whose specialty is the _Théâtre d’Ombres Chinoises_—shadow pantomime—with which the subtle artist Henri Rivière helped build up the vogue of Salis), _Le Cabaret des Quat’z’ Arts_, _Le Cabaret des Arts_, _La Veine_, and _La Lune Rousse_ are the five closest existing counterparts of the _Chat Noir_. Their decorations are highly effective, and they employ most of the _Chat Noir_ celebrities who have not, like Salis, passed over to the great majority.[98] But their performances, while of high average merit, are totally lacking in the elements of spontaneity and unexpectedness, which constituted the rare and peculiar charm of the programmes of the _Chat Noir_ in its early and unspoiled days; and their prices, which have increased in direct proportion as intrinsic interest has decreased, are prohibitive for most of the real Bohemians of Montmartre. The truth is, these cabarets have long ceased to attract the _Montmartrois_, and are kept up as mere show places for provincial and foreign tourists. It is only in their front rooms, where prices are normal and no performances worth mentioning are given—at the hour of the _apéritif_, that one may find any number of truly representative _Montmartrois_.
At _La Boîte à Fursy_ (in the building to which the _Chat Noir_ repaired when the complaints of its neighbours and the need of more room forced it to quit its original home on the Boulevard de Rochechouart) and _Le Tréteau de Tabarin_ (also under the management of Fursy) the prices are still more prohibitive, so far as Bohemia is concerned, and the audiences, by just so much the more, unrepresentative.
All these places have been practically abandoned by their former patrons, and by the unprofessional singing, rhyming, reciting Bohemians in general, for tiny, obscure cafés or wine-shops,[99] whose tininess and obscurity are defences against sight-seeing invasion, and for private ateliers, from which the uninvited may be readily ejected. Those who, depressed by the professionalism, mercenary spirit, and monotony of the best-known cabarets, declare that the spirit of Bohemianism has abandoned the Butte, do not take into account these multitudinous Bohemian conclaves, of which they are, in all probability, totally ignorant.