Le Rouge et le Velours Noir

"While people are here," says "Jacques Dujardin," a sly-eyed man with a bright scarf tied around his neck who approaches me at the bar, "drinking and dancing and diluting their tedious minds with liquor and ladies' undergarments, there is an artistic revolution brewing in the gutters of Paris. The Hydropathes! The Incoherents! The So-Whats! The Theatre of the Absurd! They will change urbane morality and crush the bourgeoisie."

"No, no, no," argues Joshua Astor, dressed in the signature black hat, red scarf, and black cape of Montmartre song-stylist Aristide Bruant. "Merde! You are many years too soon. You must wait until the Chat Noir and the Quat'z'Arts become popular. Rodolphe Salis has not even yet begun his obscene puppet plays about flatulence. That is when art becomes something again."

In the ballroom, a woman playing La Goulue, whose identifying black velvet choker became a national fad during her lifetime, introduces the Peerless Ballet Troop. The delightful, meticulously choreographed cancan routine is rife with sexual innuendo, unreasonable leg extensions, and frilly underpants (nothing as risqué as the real undergarments of the time, assures Cathleen Myers) that get the crowd howling loud enough to overcome the dancers' squeals.

"Vayne Borjingsky," a great bear of a man in a furry Russian hat and coat, observes the performance with an unyielding eye and a delicate woman on his arm. A small badge on his lapel bears the picture of Paul Hampton, a longtime friend and fellow PEERS pa-tron who was killed by a drunk driver in February.

"His girlfriend was without an escort," says Borjingsky, "so I have come to watch over her. She is in mourning, but this is a wonderful dance."

Cathleen Myers invites the crowd to learn the Moulin Rouge Lancers Quadrille. Two large circles are formed with ladies on the left (considered indecent in England).

"Ladies, you are the boss here," counsels Myers. "Take your man and promenade for a 16 count." The crowd spins and twirls, switching couples four times before the dance ends and another tango is called.

Ethan Hay slinks by with a slapdash ascot stuffed into the neck of his rumpled jacket and a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his perpetually pursed lips. His dance partner, Kathie Kertesz, seems captivated.

"This is easily one of the greatest PEERS dances," says Hay down his nose, with sinisterly squinting eyes. "I pulled this character right out of the exhibit at the Legion of Honor. Fantastic."

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At the Legion of Honor, anchored by a pair of headphones and a push-button tour guide, I wander through a maze of posters Toulouse-Lautrec designed for "underground" venues in Montmartre. Over the swirling sound of laughter, clinking glasses, and songs sung by Yvette Guilbert, I learn that the Hydropathes were a group of artists who frequented Le Moulin Rouge and viewed eccentricity as an art form. So, too, did the Incoherents (though they were more partial to Chat Noir and corporeal output such as Alphonse Allais' blank musical composition "Funeral March for a Deaf Man"). I watch museum patrons poring over sketches -- adolescent cartoons of giant butts farting on men's heads, or public figures dressed in women's clothes -- that once hung on Le Mur, a large wall considered a collaborative "collage" by regular drinkers at Quat'z'Arts, and wonder why my local bars and cafes don't have manifestoes. I learn that Montmartre residents considered it artistic subversion when someone from a middle-class neighborhood chose to hang one of Lautrec's advertisements in his drawing room; I wonder what level of sedition a museum exhibition might represent. I learn that La Goulue retired from her dance-hall days a wealthy and famous woman of 25, then died a penniless alcoholic selling cigarettes in the street; I learn that Theatre of the Absurd creator Alfred Jarry also died a ravaged alcoholic in his early 30s, as did Toulouse-Lautrec, whose excesses exacerbated his already ill health.

"They didn't live long, but they were funny, and they knew how to party," says Jarrod Burgleman, whom I recognize as a jaunty two-stepper from Le Bal du Moulin Rouge.

"You should come down to my neighborhood sometime," I say, hanging up my museum tour guide and self-consciously adjusting my black velvet choker.