William H.Rideing, in an article which was published in "Scribner's Magazine" for November, 1879, described these men as he had found them in the Taverne Alsacienne in Greene Street: "gathered around the tables absorbed in piquet, ecarte, or vingt-et-un ...

most of them without coats, the shabbiness of their other garments lighted up by a brilliant red bandanna kerchief or a crimson overshirt." Keen glances were shot at strangers, for the tavern had a certain _clientele_ outside of which it had few customers and suspicion was rife at any invasion.

"They are drinking wine, vermouth, and greenish opaline draughts of absinthe.

Staggering in unnerved and stupefied from the previous night's debauch, they show few signs of vitality until four or five glasses of the absinthe have been drunk, and then they awaken; their eyes brighten and their tongues are loosened--the routine of play, smoke, and alcohol is resumed." Pleasanter to recall are the sober, industrious men and women who were denizens of the neighbourhood in the years gone by--Mademoiselle Berthe and her little sisters, fabricating roses and violets out of muslin and wax in their attic apartment, Madame Lange, the _blanchisseuse_, ironing in front of an open window, Triquet, the _charcutier_, Roux, the _bottier_, Malvaison, the _marchand de vin_.

Then there were others of the colony, higher in the social scale and less prosperous in their finances, the impecunious music-teachers and professors of languages who maintained themselves with a frosty air of shabby gentility on a very slender income, and the practitioners of literature and art who maintained themselves somehow on no income at all.