It is possible that I was the more impressed by the beauty of the show because it was not of that side of the _Chat Noir_ I had heard most. Its British admirers or critics, when they got back to London, had far more to say of it as a haunt of vice, if not as decadents to parade their wide and experienced knowledge of Paris, then as students who had gone there very likely to gather further confirmation of the popular British belief in Paris as the headquarters of vice and frivolity. To this day the hero or heroine of the British novel who is led astray is apt to cross the Channel for the purpose. It was a delicate matter to accomplish this in the Nineties when the novelist happened to be a woman, for even the "New Woman" cry, if it armed her with her own front-door key, could not draw all the bolts and bars of convention for her. I can remember the plight of the highly correct Englishwoman, upon whom British fiction depended for its respectability, who wanted to send her young hero from the English provinces to the _Chat Noir_ in the course of a rake's progress, and who avoided facing the contamination herself by shifting to her husband the task of collecting the necessary local colour on the spot. She did well, for had she gone she could not have been so scandalized as the young Briton in her book was obliged to be for the sake of the story. Those who had eyes and ears for it could see and hear all the license they wanted, those who had eyes and ears for the beauty could rest content with that, and as far as my impression of the place goes, Salis, if he allowed license at the _Chat Noir_, refused to put up with either the affectation or the advertisement of it. I cannot forget the night when a young American woman took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit a cigarette. It would not have seemed a desperate deed in proper England where every other woman had begun to smoke in public, probably more in public than in private, for with many smoking was part of the "New Woman" crusade--"I never liked smoking," an ardent leader in the cause told me once, "but I smoked until we won the right to." France, or Salis, however, still drew a rigid line that refused women the same right in France, and with the American's first whiff he was bidding her good-night and politely, but firmly, showing her the door.