Le Chat Noir

Rodolphe Salis (1851–1897), the son of a limonadier of Châtellerault, reached Paris in 1872 and made a poor living at first producing devotional objects, before conceiving the idea of putting art and the drinks trade together. He pictured a café "of the purest Louis XIII style"; what opened at 84 boulevard de Rochechouart, at the foot of Montmartre, on 18 November 1881 was two small rooms serving bad wine in a rudimentary setting. How the house came by its name is told several ways: that Salis found a stray black cat on the pavement during the building work, that it was taken from Edgar Allan Poe's tale The Black Cat, and that the black cat was a reference to Paris itself and its night-time strays.

The success of the cabaret was assured by the arrival of the Hydropathes, a club of radical young writers and artists led by the journalist Émile Goudeau. The club had met at Goudeau's house on the Left Bank and had outgrown it; Salis persuaded him to bring the meetings across the river to his own establishment. Within a short time the poets and chansonniers performing at the Chat Noir were drawing the best clientele in Paris. Salis had the idea of installing a piano, a first in a cabaret, and cabaret song proper was born there. Aristide Bruant, who wrote the song Le Chat noir, Jules Jouy, Alphonse Allais, Charles Cros and Maurice Rollinat were among the regulars, and Léon Bloy, Goudeau's cousin, published in the house review the literary criticism he later gathered into his Propos d'un entrepreneur de démolitions of 1884.

The earliest identified of the cabaret's periodicals is Le Chat noir: organe des intérêts de Montmartre, published from 1882 and appearing on Saturdays; it became La Revue illustrée du Chat noir, a weekly created by Salis and Goudeau to promote the house, carrying literary writing, news of Montmartre, poetry and political satire. It ran to 688 numbers between 14 January 1882 and March 1895, followed by 122 more in a second series whose last issue appeared on 30 September 1897. Its contributors were the chansonniers and poets who performed in the cabaret and the artists who had decorated it, Caran d'Ache supplying military scenes and Willette his Pierrots and Colombines, with signed pieces by Paul Verlaine and Jean Richepin. A second publication, L'Album du Chat noir, was issued from 1885 with Henri Rivière as artistic director.

Le Chat Noir soon outgrew its first site, and in June 1885, three and a half years after opening, it moved to a three-storey building nearby at 12 rue de Laval, now rue Victor-Massé. The new venue was the old private mansion of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, who at Salis's request transformed it into a "fashionable country inn" with the help of the architect Maurice Isabey. The house presented itself as a theatre and let hotel rooms as well, and the sign at the front, in painted sheet metal, was a black cat seated on a silver crescent moon drawn by Adolphe Willette.

Salis, with exaggerated and ironic politeness, most often took the role of conférencier, and the Salon des Arts Incohérents, the shadow plays and the comic monologue all got their start here. Those who patronised the house included Paul Verlaine, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, who composed one of his major pieces there, Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the evenings were also animated by the Catalan painter Pere Romeu, who went on to found Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona.

The shadow plays began at the end of 1885, when the painter Henry Somm and the illustrator George Auriol built a puppet theatre in the house for adults-only performances. One day Henri Rivière hung a white napkin across its opening and moved a cardboard puppet behind the lit screen while Jules Jouy sang and accompanied himself at the piano. In 1887 Rivière replaced the puppet theatre with a proper shadow theatre, its screen 1.1 m by 1.4 m and held in a large frame, and zinc figures took the place of the original cardboard cutouts after that year. Behind the screen on the second floor he worked with up to twenty assistants, projecting backgrounds with a double optical lantern, while Georges Fragerolle composed the music and Salis read out, after each performance, the stories the writers of the house had written. Caran d'Ache designed around fifty cutouts for the very popular 1888 show L'Epopée. Under Salis's management the cabaret produced forty-five shadow plays between 1885 and 1896, and the company began touring in 1892, chiefly around France in the summer but also to Tunis, Algeria and Belgium; Steinlen's poster of 1896 announced one of those tours.

The company's last shadow play was staged in January 1897, after which Salis took it on tour. He was talking of plans to move the cabaret to a site in Paris itself when he died on 19 March 1897. His widow took charge and organised further tours, with Dominique Bonnaud replacing him as the storyteller; he did it well, but the quality of the performances declined, and other establishments had by then made their names copying the Chat Noir's techniques, shows and décor.

The fascination with Montmartre had already diminished, and Salis had already disposed of many of the club's assets and facilities; the artists dispersed soon after his death and the cabaret slowly disappeared. Two years later the cabaret on rue Victor-Massé was bought by the Montmartre chansonnier Henri Dreyfus, known as Fursy, who opened his Boîte à Fursy there in December 1899 and claimed to have inherited Salis's mantle. The building that housed the second Chat Noir has since been destroyed, and a commemorative plaque survives on the site.

Ten years after Salis's death, in 1907, a third Chat Noir opened at 68 boulevard de Clichy, at the foot of the butte of Montmartre, in an effort to resurrect, modernise and continue the work of its predecessor. It was opened by the singer Jehan Chagot with the permission of Salis's widow, was known in the press of the day as the caveau du Chat noir, and remained popular into the 1920s. By 1939 it carried a neon sign of the black cat on the moon, modelled on the one Willette had drawn, and the address still trades under the name, described in some accounts as a hotel and in others as a restaurant.

Le Chat Noir is thought to be the first modern cabaret: a nightclub where the patrons sat at tables and drank while a variety show played on stage. Its imitators have included the Stray Dog Café in St Petersburg, Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona and the Cave of the Golden Calf in London, and in Paris L'Abbaye de Thélème on the place Pigalle, created by Jules Roques, who imitated the review as well with his Courrier français. Willette's painted sheet-metal sign is kept at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Montmartre museum holds a few of the zinc shapes used in the shadow plays, and the Musée de Châtellerault has a room devoted to the cabaret with original decors and elements of the shadow theatre.