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                                THE CHAT NOIR CABARET AND JOURNAL

Billed as "a Louis XIII-style cabaret, founded by a fumiste," the Chat Noir was established in November 1881 by the artist Rodolphe Salis. Salis had met Emile Goudeau earlier that month and convinced the poet to bring the Hydropathes from the Left Bank to Montmartre, and to make the Chat Noir their new home.  In January 1882 the cabaret began publishing its own journal, Le Chat noir. Initially the cabaret was a small, two-room space with an imitation Rabelais-period interior but, within three-and-a-half years, its great popularity enabled the Chat Noir to move two blocks away into a larger and more elaborate home. The cabaret's early success was due partly to the introduction of a piano, made possible by Salis's disregard of a government statute that prohibited music in cabarets.  At this critical moment in the history of Parisian entertainment, music and song joined the cabaret's spoken repertoire of poetry and verse. Salis's promotional skill and the exaggerated accounts of the cabaret in its own journal would make a reality of the following hyperbole: "The Chat Noir is the most extraordinary cabaret in the world. You rub shoulders with the most famous men of Paris, meeting there with foreigners from every corner of the world."
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Unidentified, interior of the Chat Noir with (from left to right) Narcisse Lebeau, Henri Rivière, George Auriol, photograph. c. 1885–86.  Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Morse Fund.

Adolphe Willette, Caran d'Ache, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and, to a lesser degree, Henri Rivière and George Auriol, were the principal illustrators of the Le Chat noir during its heyday of the 1880s. With one contribution, "Pierrot fumiste," Willette introduced the journal's first "story without words." Steinlen and Caran d'Ache would use the same system to illustrate, often in  childlike scribbles, single pages and double-page spreads of Le Chat noir. The three artists combined this format with infantile but sometimes macabre stories, which seem less the diet of a sophisticated journal than the fodder for childish nightmares and fantasies.