The real student cafes and cabarets[67]—which I would not name nor locate for a kingdom, since their obscurity is the one thing that saves them from being spoiled—are the lineal descendants and, _mutatis mutandis_, the worthy successors of the cafés and cabarets of the students’ fathers and grandfathers and of the taverns of his remote forbears.
There the ancient custom of charcoaling or chalking the walls with skits, epigrams, and caricatures, is kept up.[68]
There long-haired, unkempt poets mount on tables and counters, glass in hand, and flaunt their new-born epics, tragedies, and ballads, or loll in dreamful, languishing poses and intone their elegies and idyls, as did Rutebœuf, Villon, Gringoire, and Cyrano de Bergerac in their respective epochs; Molière, Boileau, Racine, and Crébillon, in the seventeenth century, at the “_Mouton Blanc_”; as did only yesterday Mérat, Anatole France, Léon Vallade, and Leconte de Lisle at the _Café Voltaire_; De Banville, Mürger, Daudet, and Paul Arène at the _Café de l’Europe_; Coppée, Mendès, Rollinat, Mallarmé, Bourget (who began as a poet), Bouchor, Richepin, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at “The Sherry Cobbler”; and as did all the versifiers of a generation at the _Café Bobino_ (adjoining the famous little theatre of the same name), “which was,” says Daudet, “the holy of holies for everybody who rhymed, painted, and trod the boards in the _Quartier Latin_.”
There they fête the victories of their respective poetic sects—_Roman_, _Instrumentiste_, _Magique_, _Magnifique_, _Déliquescent_, _Incohérent_, or _Néo-Décadent_, as the case may be, just as the Romanticists in their time, and the Parnassians, Décadents, and Symbolists in their times, fêted their victories at the _Café Procope_. There they burn incense—as it was burned erstwhile at the _Soirées_ and _Petits Soupers Procope_ to Hugo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine—to their divinities who have consented—oh, monstrous condescension!—to foregather with them.
There, too, they blend becomingly philosophy and disputation with good cheer, as did D’Alembert, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, and Rousseau in this same all-absorbent Procope; Corot, Gérôme, Français, Jules Breton, Baudry, Harpignies, Garnier, Falguière, André Theuriet, and Edmond About at the _Café de Fleurus_; and Thérion, the original of the Elysée Mérant of Daudet’s _Rois en Exil_, Wallon, the original of Colline in Mürger’s _Vie de Bohème_, and Barbey d’Aurévilly, as famous for his lace-embroidered neckties and red-banded white trousers as for his caustic wit, at the _Café Tabourey_.