But on this evening the Moulin de la Galette was closed and then I remembered that it was open on Thursday and this was Wednesday. Is it Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday that the Moulin de la Galette is open? I think so. By this time we were determined to dance; but where? We had no desire to go to some stupid place, common to tourists, no such place as the Bal Tabarin lured us; nor did the Grelot in the Place Blanche, for we had been there a night or two before. The Elysee Montmartre (celebrated by George Moore) would be closed. Its _patron_ followed the schedule of days adopted for the Galette.... To chance I turn in such dilemmas.... I consulted a small boy, who, with his companion, had been good enough to guide us through many winding streets to the Moulin. Certainly he knew of a _bal_. Would _monsieur_ care to visit a _bal musette_? His companion was horrified. I caught the phrase "_mal frequente_." Our curiosity was aroused and we gave the signal to advance. There were two grounds for my personal curiosity beyond the more obvious ones. I seemed to remember to have read somewhere that the ladies of the court of Louis XIV played the _musette_, which is French for bag-pipe. It was the fashionable instrument of an epoch and the _musettes_ played by the _grandes dames_ were elaborately decorated. The word in time slunk into the dictionaries of musical terms as descriptive of a drone bass. Many of Gluck's ballet airs bear the title, _Musette_. Perhaps the bass was even performed on a bag-pipe.... "_Mal frequente_" in Parisian _argot_ has a variety of significations; in this particular instance it suggested _apaches_ to me. A _bal_, for instance, attended by _cocottes_, _mannequins_, or _modeles_, could not be described as _mal frequente_ unless one were speaking to a boarding school miss, for all the public _bals_ in Paris are so attended. No, the words spoken to me, in this connection, could only mean _apaches_. The confusion of epochs began to invite my interest and I wondered, in my mind's eye, how a Louis XIV _apache_ would dress, how he would be represented at a costume ball, and a picture of a ragged silk-betrousered person, flaunting a plaid-bellied instrument came to mind. An imagination often leads one violently astray. The two urchins were marching us through street after street, one of them whistling that pleasing tune, _Le lendemain elle etait souriante_. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the Place Vendome.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and they accomplished at least a third of the journey this way. Of course, I deluged them with large round five and ten _centimes_ pieces.