on the wall were intended to represent, and another youth, with a Vandyck beard and slouched hat, and curls hanging to his shoulder, sang Aristide Bruant's song of "Saint Lazare." All of the women of the place belonged to the class which spends many months of each year in that prison. The music of the song is in a minor key, and is strangely sad and eerie. It is the plaint of a young girl writing to her lover from within the walls of the prison, begging him to be faithful to her while she is gone, and Bruant cynically makes her designate three or four feminine friends as those whose society she particularly desires him to avoid. The women, all of whom sang with sodden seriousness, may not have appreciated how well the words of the song applied to themselves, but you could imagine that they did, and this gave to the moment and the scene a certain touch of interest. Apart from this the place was dreary, and the pictures indecent and stupid. There is much more of interest in the Café of Aristide Bruant, on the Boulevard Rochechouart. Bruant is the modern François Villon. He is the poet of the people, and more especially of the criminal classes. He sings the virtues or the lack of virtue of the several districts of Paris, with the life of which he claims an intimate familiarity. He is the bard of the bully, and of the thief, and of the men who live on the earnings of women. He is unquestionably one of the most picturesque figures in Paris, but his picturesqueness is spoiled in some degree by the evident fact that he is conscious of it. He is a poet, but he is very much more of a _poseur_. [Illustration: AT BRUANT'S]