Meanwhile they begin to disturb us by giving signs of closing the Boulevard cafés, but as I do not want to finish, I name the word "Baratte," and my friend is ready at once. Café Baratte, near the "Halls," has always had a wonderful attraction for me, without my exactly knowing why. It may be the proximity of the "Halls." When it is night on the Boulevard, it is morning in them--all through the night in fact--which with its enforced want of occupation and dark dreams is banished. The mind which has become intoxicated in immaterial worlds descends to eating, sin, and noise. This scent of fish, flesh, and vegetables, over the refuse of which we step, seems to me an effective contrast to the lofty themes which we have just been discussing. That is the stuff out of which we are created and re-created three times a day, and when one enters from the darkness, dirt, and knots of seedy figures outside, into the comfortable café, one is greeted by light, warmth, song, mandolines, and guitars. At this hour of the day all class distinctions are wiped out. Here sit artists, students, authors, drinking at long tables, and in a sort of waking trance. Or have they fled from the sad sleep which, perhaps, has ceased to visit them? There is no sparkling hilarity, but a kind of stupor broods over the whole, and it seems to me as if I had entered into a realm of shadows peopled by half-real phantoms. I know an author who used to sit there at night and write. I have seen strangers there dressed as though they came from a brilliant supper at Parc Monceau. I have seen a public man, with the appearance of a foreign ambassador, stand up and sing a solo. I have seen people who looked like disguised princes and princesses drinking champagne, and I really don't know whether they are real mortals, all these shadows, or the projected "astral" bodies of sleepers outside who hallucinate those drunk with sleep who sit there. The remarkable thing is that no coarseness prevails in the company packed together in the narrow café. The songs are mostly sentimental, and the melancholy guitars heal the needle-pricks with which the sharp steel-strung mandoline pricks the brain. Now in the night, after my long course of loneliness, I feel happy in the crowd, which seems to radiate warmth and sympathy. For the first time after a long interval I am seized with a sentimental pity for the unhappy women of the night. Near our table sit half a dozen of them looking depressed, and not having ordered anything. They are most of them ugly, despised, and probably unable to order anything. I suggest to my friend, who is as disinterested as myself, to invite two of the ugliest who sit near us. He agrees; and I invite two, asking if they will have anything to drink, adding at the same time that they must have no other designs and behave with propriety.