The Gipsy Bar, Paris 1928

The Gipsy Bar was a little foul-smelling boîte on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, full of hardfaced young lesbians and desperate looking old women whose spotted, sinewy arms rattled with jewelled bracelets. We were hailed by a tableful of the latter, one of whom, rather younger than the rest, was wearing male evening dress and a monocle. They insisted we sit with them. The conversation, incredibly dull, was carried on with a superfluity of cant words and indecent euphemisms.

'Are you shocked, little bird?' the woman with the monocle asked me, raising her artificially thickened eyebrows.

'Indeed I am.'

'Your health, little mouse! What will you drink? But not beer, it's so bloody English.'

I was then obliged to drink a diablo, a sickening mixture of port and grenadine that I had thought was drunk by nobody except prostitutes, and to dance with the monocled lady. She took the lead and I found it rather awkward to begin with. But she was a fine dancer and I soon found myself being waltzed around very pleasantly. There were a few other couples, each arranged in a similar reverse dispositin, but most of the other dancers were women, with the male types leading.

A new arrival suddenly evoked screams of joy. A curvaceous squat man in black, with blue shaven jowls covered with violet talcum-powder and eyes loaded with mascara, he held his hands in front of him like a dancing dog.

'Dan! Dan!" everyone shouted.

This was the famous Dr Maloney, the most-quoted homosexual in Paris, a man who combined the professions of pathic, abortionist, professional boxer and quasi-confessor to literary women. He waddled forward and a place at our table was made for him at once.

'I have just had a marvellous experience,' he murmered to the old women in the purple velvet hat who was our hostess. 'Such a divine piece of rough trade, my dear, with wooden shoes, velveteen trousers and a gorgeous three days' beard. Not until out encounter--if you will pardon the expression--was over did I learn he was a genuine grave-digger! I was furious. If I had only known...' He snapped his fingers with extraordinary force, and two waiters came running. 'Champagne, champagne, to celebrate the victory of vice over the grave!'

Dr Maloney then treated us to an astonishing harangue revolving around unmentionable subjects and indescribable practices.

--Memoirs of Montparnasse, by John Glassco