B669 <=> B671 [BTG XXXVII France, p. 670]

“Having taken one of these guides, we also went to see the nocturnal ‘sights’ of that contemporary Koorkalai.

“We visited various of these ‘haunts’; we were in the cafe of the ‘homosexuals,’ and in the club of the ‘Lesbians,’ and in many of those ‘evil hearths’ where every ‘abnormality’ proceeds, which are repeated from time to time in all the chief ‘centers-of-culture’ of these unfortunates.

“Visiting these disreputable places, we eventually reached the streets of the famous, as it is called ‘Montmartre,’ not strictly on Montmartre itself, but on the lower slope of the district of that name, which abounds in every kind of nocturnal maleficent ‘disreputable establishment,’ destined however not for the beings of that community France, but exclusively for the beings only who come there from other separately independent groupings, or, as they themselves say, for ‘foreigners.’

“Besides many of these dubious establishments, there likewise exist there a great many night restaurants, for foreign visitors also, which are open the whole night long.

“All this district in general only becomes animated at night; by day it is almost, as they express it there’ ‘dead,’ and of foreign visitors not one ever goes there.

“In all these restaurants there are what are called ‘open stages’ on which they show various ‘amazing things,’ which proceed, as it were, among those beings similar to themselves who belong to other communities existing on other parts of the surface of their planet.

“They show that ‘stomach dance’ of the African beings, the Caucasians with their ‘dagger dances’ and the ‘mulattos’ with their snakes – in a word, whatever is considered at that season to be a ‘fashionable novelty’!