Bruant began by singing his own songs in the café chantant in the Champs Élysées, and celebrating in them the life of Montmartre and the Place de la République, and of the Bastille. He has done for the Parisian bully what Albert Chevallier has done for the coster of Whitechapel, and Edward Harrigan for the East Side of New York, but with the important difference that the Frenchman claims to be one of the class of whom he writes, and the audacity with which he robs stray visitors to his café would seem to justify his claims. There is no question as to the strength in his poems, nor that he gives you the spirit of the places which he describes, and that he sees whatever is dramatic and characteristic in them. But the utter heartlessness with which he writes of the wickedness of his friends the souteneurs rings false, and sounds like an affectation. One of the best specimens of his verse is that in which he tells of the Bois de Boulogne at night, when the woods, he says, cloak all manner of evil things, and when, instead of the rustling of the leaves, you hear the groans of the homeless tossing in their sleep under the sky, and calls for help suddenly hushed, and the angry cries of thieves who have fallen out over their spoils and who fight among themselves; or the hurried footsteps of a belated old gentleman hastening home, and followed silently in the shadow of the trees by men who fall upon and rob him after the fashion invented and perfected by le Père François. Others of his poems are like the most realistic paragraphs of _L'Assommoir_ and _Nana_ put into verse. Bruant himself is a young man, and an extremely handsome one. He wears his yellow hair separated in the middle and combed smoothly back over his ears, and dresses at all times in brown velvet, with trousers tucked in high boots, and a red shirt and broad sombrero. He has had the compliment paid him of the most sincere imitation, for a young man made up to look exactly like him now sings his songs in the cafés, even the characteristically modest one in which Bruant slaps his chest and exclaims at the end of each verse: "And I? I am Bruant." The real Bruant sings every night in his own café, but as his under-study at the Ambassadeurs' is frequently mistaken for him, he may be said to have accomplished the rather difficult task of being in two places at once.