Across the way from this ball-room there is a large “brewery,” as it is called—­a combination of beer-hall, wineshop, cafe and billiard-room—­where for eight cents you may play a game of billiards, or for twelve cents may play an hour.  Beer is four cents the glass, and wine two cents, for in Paris wine is cheaper than beer.  Blousards crowd this place at all hours of the night.

Near by is a cafe concert.  A “Grande Soiree Lyrique” is the entertainment offered us at the Maison Doucieux, as we learn from the rudely-written handbill which hangs at the entrance.  Through a long, winding, narrow, dark and dirty passage, up a rickety stone staircase, through another passage, and we stand in a crowded hall, at whose lower end a rude stage is erected, on which a ragged man is bawling a comic song.  In the midst of it there is a disturbance:  a drunken man has climbed upon the back of a seat to light his pipe at the chandelier, and falling thence has enraged the fallen-upon to that extent that a fight ensues.  In a twinkling the tipsy man is dragged out of the door, to the delight of the audience, who shout “Bravo!” as he disappears.  The concert is not entertaining, and we follow him out.  He is carefully propped up against a wall by those who put him into the street, and when we come upon him is growling maledictions upon his enemies, with his hair about his eyes and his hands clawing the air.  Four bareheaded women, roaring with laughter, come marching abreast along the middle of the street, and picking up the drunkard’s battered hat disappear in the gloomy distance, boisterously thrusting the hat upon each other’s heads in turn.

A cafe chantant of a more pretentious sort than the Maison Doucieux, but still the peculiar resort of the blousard—­for there are cafe chantants of many grades in Paris—­may be found in one of the back streets near the Boulevard St. Martin.  Some of the cafes chantants are patronized by the well-dressed class, and a blousard is no more likely to be seen in their orchestra fauteuils than in the same division of the regular theatres.  The El Dorado, for example, in the Boulevard Strasbourg, is as large and almost as elegant as Booth’s Theatre in New York, but it is a cafe chantant.  Keeping still to the favorite haunts of the blousard, we enter the showiest of the cafes chantants peculiar to him—­as free-and-easy a beuglant as one could wish.  Beuglant, by the way, is the argot name of this sort of place; and as the word comes from beugler, to “bellow,” it may easily be seen how flattering it is as a definite noun for a place where the chief attraction is the singing.