in the Battle of the Marne or he may have murdered his _gigolette_ and been transported to one of the French penal colonies.... An _apache, en musicien!_ ... black cloth around his throat, hair parted in the middle, _velours_ trousers; a _vrai apache_ I tell you, a cool, cunning creature, shredded with cocaine and absinthe, monotonous in his virtuosity, playing the accordion. He had begun before we arrived and he continued after we left. I like to think of him as always playing, but it is not so.... As for the dancers, they were of various kinds and sorts. The women had that air which gave them the stamp of a quarter; they wore loose _blouses_, tucked in plaid skirts, or dark blue skirts, or multi-coloured calico skirts (if you have seen the lithographs of Steinlen you may reconstruct the picture with no difficulty) and they danced in that peculiar fashion so much in vogue in the Northern outskirts of Paris. The men seized them tightly and they whirled to the inexorable music when it was a waltz, whirled and whirled, until one thought of the Viennese and how they become as dervishes and Japanese mice when one plays Johann Strauss. But in the dances in two-four time their way was more our way, something between a one-step, a mattchiche, and a tango, with strange fascinating steps of their own devising, a folk-dance manner.... Yes, under their feet, the dance became a real dance of the people and, when we entered into it, our feet seemed heavy and our steps conventional, although we tried to do what they did. (How they did laugh at us!) And the strange youth emphasized the effect of folk-dancing by playing old _chansons de France_ which he mingled with his repertory of _cafe-concert_ airs. And there was achieved that wonderful thing (to an artist) a mixture of _genres_--intriguing one's curiosity, awakening the most dormant interest, and inspiring the dullest imagination.