ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship between humorous performances, the life of the city, and the role of sensory experience in evoking forms of perceptual life beyond the limits of biological life. Investigating ghostly, supernatural and synaesthetic literary and performed landscapes, the chapter explores how these landscapes evoked and parodied the limits of sensory life. In contrast to the usual emphasis in the culture of the Third Republic on documenting the experiential life and organic vitality of the modern city, many Montmartre writers constructed disturbing poetic landscapes of dead, anaesthetized urban space. During its early years, the Chat Noir remained a very small institution with a marginal place in the cultural topography of Paris. The technique of shadow plays was invented by a Chat Noir regular called Henri Rivire. The shadow theatre seemed, to awe-struck observers, to open a window onto a new mystical realm of reality. Jules Lematre observed that, the Chat Noir contributed to the awakening of idealism.
