THOSE WHO ARE GOING AWAY
Aristide Bruant is dead

Barely three months ago, old Bruant was reaping applause at the Empire from an audience that was still amazed by his verve and enthusiasm. A few days ago we received a reissue of the best of his songs, under the cover of Lucien Laforge: In the street, nothing foreshadowed the death, which occurred suddenly yesterday afternoon, of this singer who knew the most authentic glory, that which goes from the aristocratic suburbs to the working-class suburbs and who even, it must be said, grew by lending a talent and a name which brought success to the serial and the theater, Because La Loupiote, Les Trois Légionnaires, Les Bas-Fonds de Paris, if they add nothing to the indisputable verve of the singer of A Saint-Lazare, Aux Batignolles, A Ménilmontant, A Belleville, etc., whose heroes were magnificently portrayed by Steinlen, have consecrated for the public of the Ambigu and for the regular readers of the ground floors of the big dailies, the fame of the former singer of "l'Européen" and of the "Chat Noir" which became, under his direction, Le "Mirliton".
The old and young Parisians who heard him during his long and successful career, and even those who were the good-natured victims of his truculent "gueulades", cannot forget his accent and his attitude, so malely unlucky, so cocky and his very personal way of pushing the refrain, of making it, most often, a vengeful leitmotif of which each word made a bullet and carried. Coppée, who had not yet fallen to the poems of circumstance for religious patronages, revealed him by an article in the Journal to the general public. People crowded for many evenings around the table of the cabaret on which he suddenly appeared and, throwing back his head with an air of defiance, intoned in his brassy voice where trembled a little of mocking emotion, couplets which have become "classics".
He is a very Parisian figure and, let's say it, he is simply a figure who is disappearing. Many suburbanites will regret no longer seeing his familiar silhouette dressed in velvet and, above the large red muffler, the black felt hat whose broad wings beat in the wind like those of a powerful migratory bird, emerge in the steep little streets of Montmartre, where "Monsieur Bruant" had properties.

G. R.