Two gendarmes, with their capes folded and thrown over their shoulders, come in and stand with the waiters, surveying the rehearsal with critical disapproval, and the woman who collects the pennies for the iron seats in the avenue takes a few moments' recess, and brings with her two nurse-maids, with their neglected charges swinging by the silken straps around their silken bodies. And so they all stand at one side and gaze with large eyes at the breathless, laughing young woman on the stage above them, who runs and kicks and runs back and kicks again, reflected many times in the background of mirrors around her; and then the two American song-and-dance men, and the English acrobats, and the Italian who owns the performing dogs, and the smooth-faced French comédiennes, and all the idle gentlemen with glasses of bock before them, sit up as though some one had touched their shoulders with a whip, and all the actresses smile politely, and look with pressed lips and half-closed eyes at a very tall woman with red hair, who walks erectly down the stage with a roll of music in her gloved hands. This is Yvette Guilbert, the most artistic and the most improper of all the women of the cafés chantants. She is also the most graceful. You can see that even now when she is off her guard. She could not make an ungraceful gesture even after long practice, and when she shudders and jumps at a false note from the orchestra she is still graceful. When the rehearsal is finished you can cross the Place de la Concorde and hang over the stone parapet, and watch the Deputies coming over the bridge, or the men washing the dogs in the Seine, and shaving and trimming their tufts of curly hair, and twisting their mustaches into military jauntiness; or you can turn your back to this and watch the thousands of carriages and cabs and omnibuses crossing the great square before you from the eight streets opening into it, with the water of the fountains in the middle blown into spray by the wind, and turned into the colors of the rainbow by the sun. This great, beautiful open place, even to one accustomed to city streets and their monuments, seems to change more rapidly and to form with greater life than any other spot in the world, and its great stupid obelisk in the centre appears to rise like a monster exclamation-point of wonder at what it sees about it, and with the surprise over all of finding itself in the centre of it. [Illustration: "AND YOU BELIEVE THE GUIDES"]