And now, after colour and gaiety—ambiguity, gloom. Away to remote, neglected corners of Paris; to the _terrain vague_—the waste ground—of the Amazing City, which, this particular afternoon, lies steeped in a damp fog, and strewn with sodden newspapers and broken bottles, and pots and pans without handles, hats without brims, and battered old shoes. On the waste, prowling about amidst the wreckage, a gaunt, vagabond cat. Gathering together odds and ends, the aged, bent _chiffonnière_—a hag of a woman, half demented, with fingers like claws, that go scraping and digging about in the refuse. Then three ragged children—skeletons almost—also interested in the rubbish, who are savagely snarled at by the _chiffonnière_ when they approach her preserves. Fog, damp and puddles. Mounds of overturned earth, subsidences, crevices. A rusty engine lying disabled on its side. Quantities of coarse, savage thistles. Gloom unrelieved. The _chiffonnière_ and the ragged children becoming more and more ghostly and ghastly in the half-light. The kind of scene depicted so tragically by the great-hearted Steinlen, and sung of so despairingly by the humane poet, Rictus. Sung of, too, by lesser poets than the author of the _Soliloque d’un Pauvre_. For _terrain vague_ is a favourite theme with the _chansonniers_ of Montmartre, and in their songs they are fond of describing how they have passed from comfortable, bourgeois neighbourhoods on to “waste ground.” The bourgeois was dozing in his chair; Madame la Bourgeoise was knitting a hideous woollen shawl; Mademoiselles the three daughters were respectively tinkling away at the piano, pasting picture cards into an album, absorbing a sickly novel. As a heartrending, an overwhelming contrast, behold—after the snugness of the bourgeoisie—the wretchedness, the _misère noire_ of the human phantoms poking about on the waste ground! “Would that I had a bourgeois here on this _terrain vague_; a bourgeois I might terrify and harrow!” declaim the realistic _chansonniers_ of the Montmartre cabarets. “‘Bourgeois,’ I would cry, ‘what do you see? Bourgeois, look well, look again, look always. Bourgeois, do you understand? It is well, wretched, cowardly Bourgeois—you tremble!’”