Page:Ballads of a Bohemian.djvu/21

Rh nervously I paced up and down my garret; bitterly I flung myself on my bed. Then suddenly it all came. Line after line I wrote with hardly a halt. So I made another of my Ballads of the Boulevards. Here it is:

You’ve heard of Julot the apache, and GigoIette, his môme…. Montmartre was their hunting-ground, but Belville was their home. A little chap just like a boy, with smudgy black mustache,— Yet there was nothing juvenile in Julot the apache. From head to heel as tough as steel, as nimble as a cat, With every trick of twist and kick, a master of savate. And Gigolette was tall and fair, as stupid as a cow, With three combs in the greasy hair she banged upon her brow. You’d see her on the Place Pigalle on any afternoon, A primitive and strapping wench as brazen as the moon. And yet there is a tale that’s told of Clichy after dark, And two gendarmes who swung their arms with Julot for a mark. And oh, but they’d have got him too; they banged and blazed away,