Hurried Cossacks

When under heavy rain, Montmartre is quite different from the normally overcrowded place we usually expect. Instead, notably in place du Tertre (place of the hillock), we would find out only a few courageous artists sketching or painting some tourists who would now prefer be somewhere else in a dry place. We would notice the soaked canopies' colours that have become somewhat saturated. We would also breathe the typical odours exhumed by paving stones.

But most peculiar, when the place is mostly deserted in such circumstances, we would have that ghostly sensation of being surrounded by Piaf, Corot, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Pissarro, and Aristide Bruant, still talking and walking on these streaming stones...

It's during such greyish moments, near two centuries ago, that hurried Cossacks shouted “Bistro! Bistro!” in the – still existing - Mère Catherine bistro, place du Tertre. One only has to know that the Russian word bistro means fast in English to discover the name of these common establishments found in Paris.