The little indecencies, the sly allusions, the candour of French comedy remained, and often it was only stupidity which made one laugh.  Nothing on earth could have been more ridiculous than the little lady who strutted up and down the stage, in the uniform of a British Tommy, to the song of “Tipperary,” which she rendered as a sentimental ballad, with dramatic action.  When she lay down on her front buttons and died a dreadful death from German bullets, still singing in a feeble voice:  “Good-bye, Piccadilly; farewell, Leicester Square,” there were British officers in the boxes who laughed until they wept, to the great astonishment of a French audience, who saw no humour in the exhibition.

The kilted ladies of the Olympia would have brought a blush to the cheeks of the most brazen-faced Jock from the slums of Glasgow, though they were received with great applause by respectable French bourgeois with elderly wives.  And yet the soul of Paris, the big thing in its soul, the spirit which leaps out to the truth and beauty of life, was there even in Olympia, among the women with the roving eyes, and amidst all those fooleries.

Between two comic “turns” a patriotic song would come.  They were not songs of false sentiment, like those patriotic ballads which thrill the gods in London, but they had a strange and terrible sincerity, not afraid of death nor of the women’s broken hearts, nor of the grim realities of war, but rising to the heights of spiritual beauty in their cry to the courage of women and the pity of God.  They sang of the splendours of sacrifice for France and of the glory of that young manhood which had offered its blood to the Flag.  The old Roman spirit breathed through the verses of these music-hall songs, written perhaps by hungry poets au sixieme etage, but alight with a little flame of genius.  The women who sang them were artists.  Every gesture was a studied thing.  Every modulation of the voice was the result of training and technique.  But they too were stirred with a real emotion, and as they sang something would change the audience, some thrill would stir them, some power, of old ideals, of traditions strong as natural instinct, of enthusiasm for their country of France, for whom men will gladly die and women give their heart’s blood, shook them and set them on fire.

10

The people of Paris, to whom music is a necessity of life, were not altogether starved, though orchestras had been abolished in the restaurants.  One day a well-known voice, terrific in its muscular energy and emotional fervour, rose like a trumpet-call in a quiet courtyard off the Rue St. Honore.  It was the voice of “Bruyant Alexandre”—­“Noisy Alexander”—­who had new songs to sing about the little soldiers of France and the German vulture and the glory of the Tricolour.  Giving part of his proceeds to the funds for the wounded, he went from courtyard to courtyard—­one could trace his progress by vibration of tremendous