French Cafes in the 19th Century OR: Next Week on Arrested Development

From "The Painting of Modern Life"

"...Towards the back a theatre stage with footlights; and on it a comic in evening dress. He sang disconnected things, interspersed with chortling and farmyard noises, the sounds of animals in heat, epileptic gesticulations--a Saint Vitus's dance of idiocy. The audience went wild with enthusiasm...I may be wrong, but it seems to me we are heading for a revolution. There is a rottenness and stupidity in the public, a laughter so unwholesome that it will take a great upheaval, the spilling of blood, to clear the air and make even comedy sanitary."