Tango Nights in Montparnasse

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17729, 26 December 1925, Page 17 (Supplement)

Tango Nights in Montparnasse

(By

Ethel Marinin

in the “Daily

Chronicle.")

Everybody knows, or should know, that ever since the Moulin Rouge became a music-hall the artists of Paris have been slowly gravitating to the more rarefied atmosphere of Montparnasse, and that is why you still find nothing but fox-trots and “blues” in Montmartre, and nothing but the French tango in Montparnasse; Montmartre is nothing but a playground for English and American tourists; but Montparnasse is the French Bohemia—all that is left of it. They were dancing a simplified form of the Argentine dance up in Montparnasse, to the mournful music of melodeons and harmoniums. hefort London had ever heard of “the French tango,” which it is now regarding as so frightfully “new.” In Paris, a few weeks ago. I asked a Parisian how long this dance had been the vogue there. He shrugged. “One cannot say. There has always been the tango. This is a little easier, perhaps, therefore it is danced more. But—there has always been the tango.”

T reflected then that the tango in its more difficult form was danced a good deal on the Riviera earlier in the year, and that at least one tango tune was played during a dancing evening at most of the big London restaurants and dance-clubs, so that it would seem we have been working up, as it were, for quite a long time for this tango boom. But all the time in the students’ cafes in Montparnasse tango nights were an established fact—tango nights that began round about ten o'clock, and seemed to go oil indefinitely; tango nights, with the couples holding hands under the beer and cof-fee-stained tables, with all the naiv«* candour of Bohemia, or clasoed in. embrace on the overcrowded dancing floor, their souls lost in the lialf-scmu-ous. half-wistful, but wholly romantic, plaintiveness of tango melodies, with the melodeons lamenting and the tenor a little out of tune . . . Shades of Henri Murger! To what sentimental reminiscences will this treacherously plaintive tango music not bring the most hardened Georgian! But these tango nights in the painters* and students’ cafes are not easy to forget ; they come l>ack with & poignant vividness at the first lament of a rneJodeon, albeit it takes the Latin temperament and the mopolitaii atmosphere of a cafe in Montparnasse to make a real tango- i-igiiL.