The establishment of this official regulation was speedily followed by the opening of unauthorized "pool-rooms" all over Paris, in cheap cabarets, tobacco-shops, coiffeurs' salons, anywhere, in which the general public were invited to come in and bet on any horse they chose, without any further concern about attending the races, and with the deduction of the smallest possible commission for the bureau, in some cases fifty or twenty-five centimes. These improvised agencies, in a great majority of cases, hold no communication whatever with the Sociétés, thus depriving them of their commissions, and offer their clients only the slightest guarantees of good faith. This abuse became so flagrant that the law had to be invoked. The popular cafés, cabarets, buvettes, brasseries, châteaux, moulins, etc., are so numerous as to be entitled to a special chapter. One of the most famous, the Moulin de la Galette, of the Montmartre quarter, is here illustrated, with a touch of the picturesque. It may be reached by the Rue Lepic, more circuitous and possibly more safe than the acrobatic ladders which lead directly to its door. Its usual customers vary from workmen's families through many varieties of painters, strangers, _filles_, and _marlous_. Its dances are not of a kind to recommend themselves to the conventional. It is even customary, before each one, for each couple to pay four sous, and it is usually the lady who pays for her cavalier. The beer-shops, or _brasseries_,--"more properly _embrasseries_,"--were invented in the Latin Quarter, but have since multiplied more on the lower boulevards. It is asserted that they were better at the beginning; M. Maurice Barres declared at one time: "The _brasserie à femmes_ is quite truly a salon." He appreciated them for the severe discipline maintained in them by the proprietor, or, at least, for the restraint imposed upon the more enterprising clients and servitors by the example of the others. "There was coquetry and flirtage, without much more." He considered this institution necessary; its influence was, in his opinion, beneficent. These superficial endearments, this amiable tone, this care to please which was there displayed, "relaxed the mind and restored the neglected faculties of our sensitiveness." Since then, he has asked himself whether the _brasseries_ have changed or whether he has grown older. Certainly, the qualities which he discovered in them no longer exist. The institution does not seem necessary; the salon is usually a hole; the attendants appear to be the refuse of those places of entertainment the character of which is revealed by the unusual size of the house number over the entrance. Even the Parisian gilding of vice sometimes wears off. [Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF HOT SOUPS BY THE SOCIETY OF THE "BOUCHÉR DE PAIN."]