café chantant

café chantant (plural café chantants or cafés chantant or cafés chantants)

1. Alternative form of café-chantant
   • 1866 January, R. H. Miles, “Egypt: and a Voyage from Sea to Sea through the Isthmus of Suez”, in William Harrison Ainsworth, editor, The New Monthly Magazine, volume CXXXVI, number DXLI, London: Chapman and Hall, […], page 122:

     In one of these café chantants I counted one afternoon, at six o’clock, no less than six billiard-tables in full play, and I noticed an improvised orchestra of a dozen musicians, one half of whom, seated facing the male performers, were women and young girls, dressed as such, but in reality Italian eunuchs;

   • 1870 February 1, “A Winter Scamper to Naples and Back”, in Hunt’s Yachting Magazine, volume XIX, number 2, London: Hunt & Co., […]; Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., […], chapter IV (Arles to Marseille), pages 79–80:

     Having with a great show of combination, varied with puffs from his ever expiring cigar, completed this effort of genius, he chatted away incessantly on all kinds of subjects, never waiting for my remarks, but continually asking questions; and then suggested our taking a turn through the cafés chantant.

   • 1875 June, Wirt Sikes, “The Blousard in His Hours of Ease”, in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, volume XV, number 43, Philadelphia, Penn.: J. B. Lippincott and Co., page 689, columns 1–2:

     A café chantant of a more pretentious sort than the Maison Doucieux, but still the peculiar resort of the blousard—for there are café chantants of many grades in Paris—may be found in one of the back streets near the Boulevard St. Martin. Some of the cafés chantants are patronized by the well-dressed class, and a blousard is no more likely to be seen in their orchestra fauteuils than in the same division of the regular theatres. […] Consommation is the convenient word of cafés chantants for food or drink of any kind, and every visitor is forced by the rules of the place to “consume” something as his title to a seat.

   • 1893, Mrs. Alexander [pen name; Annie French Hector], “Setting up House”, in Found Wanting. A Novel., Philadelphia, Penn.: J. B. Lippincott Company, page 303:

     It was a delicious, dry, warm night, the music from cafés chantant floated on the air, softened and refined by distance, and the fountains at the Ronde Point looked silvery beneath the moonbeams.

   • 2016, Mariano D’Amora, “Raffaele Viviani”, in A History of Neapolitan Drama in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, page 29:

     Nevertheless, the plot, the construction of the lines, and the fact that the proletarian characters played minor roles, whilst the major roles were still played by aristocratic characters were elements that relegated Petito and Minichini’s plays to the nineteenth century tradition. This alienated the new kind of audience that populated the halls of the cafés chantants.