It is the custom here for the orchestra to sound this preliminary note as a foretaste to the dancers of the coming piece.  Then the musicians rest on their instruments while the two men in authority on the floor set up a stentorian call of “Advance, mesdames and messieurs:  one is about to begin the waltz,” or the polka, as the name of the coming dance may be.  At this cry, through the little gates which open here and there in the wooden railing a crowd of eager clients pour upon the floor and range themselves in place.  The men in authority coolly proceed to collect a tax of two sous from each couple, and then the music and the dance begin.  In waltzing the dancers simply put their arms around each other’s necks, and thus embracing vigorously, face to face, they spin about the room, bumping against each other, laughing, shouting and chaffing.  Waiters in white aprons dodge about among the dancers, taking orders for wine, beer and punch, and exciting our constant amazement that they do not get knocked down and trampled on.  One of them approaches us and asks what we will take.  Observe, he does not ask if we will take anything, for if you sit you must “consume” either drink or cigars.  Your five cents paid at the door, you perceive, entitle you to neither a seat nor a dance.  The constant drinking which goes on is the heaviest source of income of the establishment, after all.  Yet nobody is drunk.  In New York a like amount of guzzling would have put half the men under the table by this time.  It is a popular notion that Frenchmen never get drunk, but this exaggerates the truth.  One sees almost as much drunkenness among the lower classes in Paris as in New York, but the amount of drunkenness is so trifling in proportion to the enormous amount of tippling that goes on among Frenchmen that the matter is a cause of constant wonderment to visitors from other lands.

At the end of the waltz the floor is promptly cleared again.  One woman puts her hand on the rail-fence and leaps over unconcernedly, rather than take her turn at the gate.  Then the band strikes up the opening strain of the popular opera-bouffe quadrille of the hour, and the air echoes with the shout on every side, “C’est Angot!  C’est Angot!” and the struggle for places is furious.  “Madame Angot,” the heroine of a fashionable opera-bouffe, is a market-woman, and a sort of goddess among the blousards, who are eager to dance to the inspiring melody of her song.  The men in authority have little need to persuade the dancers with their cry of “Avancez! avancez!” this time:  they have only to collect the sous, and the wild revelry begins.  The tallest man in the room leads on to the floor the shortest woman—­a little humpbacked dwarf:  he is smoking a cigar, and she a cigarette, and they dance with fury while puffing clouds of smoke.  The man jumps in the air with wondrous pigeon-wings, slaps his heels with his hands, shouts and twists his lank body into grotesque shapes.  The little dwarf, madly hilarious, rushes about with her head down, swings her long dress in the air, whirls and “makes cheeses,” and in the climax of her efforts kicks her partner squarely in the back amid roars of laughter.