at the nimble rabbit

The turn of the last century, in the part of Paris where all the starving artists are starting to live, work, love, and talk: at a local Montmartre cottage cabaret, there's Picasso - he's yelling again; Utrillo, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Braque are all there, and many more. I imagine their eyes fever-bright with vision and hunger. I imagine they have all run up sizable tabs they will try to pay with canvases. They sing the old bar songs together.

Over all this swings the "new" sign, a rabbit jumping out of a pan, nattily attired in a hat and a red sash. Painted by Andre Gill in 1875, the sign prompted the neighborhood to refer to the cabaret as "Le Lapin a Gill," or Gill's Rabbit, but you can't leave that alone when you have a hare with such panache - such nimble agility, we shall say. And that is how one of the primary hot spots of modern art practice and theory became Le Lapin Agile.

Want to go? They are still open. Here's their website. It's in French, though.