Then commenced its prosperity. It became the fashion among all classes. The rich and aristocratic went there to get the dissipation that more correct amusements would not afford them; the foreigners flocked thither in droves, for the Jardin Mabille was one phase of Parisian life which must be seen, and every girl who wanted to display her charms and graces in a way to excite attention, chose Mabille as the stage upon which to make her essay. Enter a girl from the Provinces of any peculiar type of beauty, any especial beauty of face and figure, with the wit and boldness for the venture. She danced at the Mabille. Some rich or notorious debauchee picked her up at once, and made her the fashion. He gave her carriages, costumes, palaces. Poets, who are never so divine as when a responsible spendthrift inspires them, sang the beauties of the new sensation, and all Paris talked of her. Of course she did not dance at Mabille after she had made her conquest--Mabille was her opportunity. [Sidenote: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AT THE MABILLE.] They lived their brief existence, they were attired like the butterfly while they lived but, alas! they died as does the butterfly. Originally it was the resort of the middle class of Parisians, who worked for their living, clerks, students, and that class, and grisettes, and the women who skirted the edges of decency. The dances that made the place famous were born of the natural extravagance of feeling that possesses these classes of Frenchmen, and they were done with an abandon which their paid imitators never rivaled. It was grotesque, wild and suggestive, but it was genuine. If Finette flung herself into a position that procured applause, Marie would excel her or die in the attempt. These people, forty years ago, did the grotesque because it pleased them to do it--the paid dancers last summer were mere imitations, and bad ones at that. The proprietors encouraged this kind of thing, for in it was their profit. And they engaged other women, not beautiful enough to become sensations, but accommodating enough to stay in the place nights, who were ready to endure the attentions of any man who had francs enough in his pocket to afford it, and who, for their society, would pay ten prices for refreshments; they getting their percentage regularly in the morning. We saw them by the hundred, each one with some wealthy idiot attached to her, spending his money supposing that he was seeing "life." He was, the dirty end of it, and he was paying roundly for it. Who went to Mabille? Everybody. Thirty years ago, Harriet Beecher Stowe visited it, and described it as follows: