The black Cat

See also: the black Cat (homonymy)

the black Cat was famous a Cabaret of Montmartre, founded in November 1881 by Rodolphe Salis.

The cabaret of the black Cat

Located at the foot of the hillock Montmartre, the cabaret of the Chat Noir was one of the great meeting places of All-Paris and the symbol of the Bohème at the end of the 19th century.

Wire of a keeper of a bar of Châtellerault, Rodolphe Dirtied (1851 - 1897), arrived at Paris in 1872, initially poorly earned its living as artist by manufacturing objects of piety, before conceiving the idea to associate art and bar.

He imagined to create a coffee “ purer Louis style… with a wrought iron gloss of the Byzantine time and where the gentlemen, the middle-class men and churls would henceforth be invited to drink the usual wormwood of Victor Hugo (that which Garibaldi preferred) and of the Hypocras in gold cuts”.

Actually, the black Cat, open in November 1881, started by serving as the bad wine in a summary decoration, but already, with the door, the customers were accommodated by a Suisse splendidly chamarré, covered of gold of the feet to the head, charged with making enter the painters and the poets while leaving outside to the “ infamous priests and the soldiers ”. The first black Cat was located in two small parts Boulevard of Rochechouart. It had its name with a black Chat lost on the pavement that Salis found during work. Gradually, the decoration was improved to give an aspect evocative pseudo-history of the time of Rabelais.

Dirtied had met, some time before, Emile Goudeau which he had convinced to transfer his Hydropathes, which met on left bank, in his establishment. Very quickly, the poets and the chansonniers who occurred with the black Cat attracted the best customers of Paris. One came before very for the distributed spiritual ones which often fused at the expense of the customers, challenged of a “ Tiens, finally left to you prison? ” or of a “ What you made ace of your hen of yesterday? ” with a new customer obviously accompanied by his wife. One evening, the future king Édouard  VII was apostrophized there in these terms: “ Eh well look at to me that one: one would say the Prince of Wales very pissed! ”

One found with the black Cat the painter Willette, the chansonniers Aristide Bruant, Jules Jouy, Jean Goudezki and his/her friend the humorist Alphonse Allais and the poets Charles Cros, Albert Samain, Maurice Rollinat, Maurice Mac-Nab, Jean Richepin, etc Leon Bloy one was accustomed. It published in the review of the Black Cat of many articles of literary criticism taken again for the majority in its Propos of a contractor of demolitions . Rodolphe Salis had the idea to install a piano, which was a first in a Cabaret, so that the song of cabaret was born truly with the black Cat.

Helping success, Salis transferred the cabaret in a building from three stages located in the vicinity street of Laval (today Rue Victor-Massed). In the various rooms, it made carry out decorations pseudo-histories, under the aegis of illustrators such as Henri Rivière and Caran d' Ache. It also created, with the assistance of Henri Rivière, a shadow theater colors on which true small chiefs of works were given. He moved shortly after to settle to the 68, Boulevard of Clichy.

The black Cat was, according to Laurent Tailhade, “ the Pole-axe and the Divine comedy amalgamated ” and, according to Jean Lorrain, “ the olla podrida of all the styles and all extravagances, the " reach-me-down " there secondhand trade artist, of a whole district of painters and poets, a picaresque museum and baroque of all the wild imaginings of Bohemian arrivals to fail all during twenty years, of all these wrecks: the bad surest taste beside exquisite lucky finds; polychrome statuettes and frescos of Willette; flights of nudities graciles and perverse, whipped pinks and nimbées of gold, and empaillés owls, wrought irons and earthenware cats; allegorical stained glasses, dazing enluminés color and of cruel modernity, and low-reliefs; music of Delmet and songs of Xanrof… The black Cat, the artistico-commercial fashionable country inn of the gentleman Dirtied, lord of Chatnoirville-in-Vexin, where with a blessing hand a malignant companion with moustache of reître output songs, sonnets, pochades, hard-boiled eggs and seasoned glasses of bier of glory in the decoration miraculeusement faked. ”

Many cabarets all over the world took this name since. In its time, the black Cat knew imitations whose most known the Abbey of Thélème was , Place Pigalle, created by Jules Roques.

The review of the black Cat