It smells of vice, misery, thuggery, the lowest kind of crookedness

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

The drunkenness of the poor became an object of nervous regard by the other half of the city, alternately condemned, fretted over, and rubbernecked. There was always a crowd eager for vicarious degradation. At the start of the twentieth century, Georges Cain took in Les Halles by night, heard the laughter and song at La Belle de Nuit and Le Chien Qui Fume and Le Caveau, and then went next door to L’Ange Gabriel, a notorious bistro, something like the Maxim’s of the apaches. The gigolettes and the toughs come here to swallow some snails and upend bowls of mulled wine. The big room upstairs is filled with worrisome characters, the heroes of knife fights or confidence tricks, with predatory eyes and thin lips, their girls pale with carmine mouths. All of them are smoking cigarettes, speaking in low tones while rapidly glancing to the sides, half listening to some poor devil of a violinist scratching out lugubrious waltz choruses ... a song that had just appeared anonymously that year: “If you want to be happy / Hang your landlord / Chop the priests in half…” The sheet music sold on the streets like chestnuts in winter, the vendors just a beat ahead of the cops, who seized all they could find.