The Cabaret du Néant (Cabaret of Nothingness) is a venue high in Montmartre in Uchronic Paris, where the Paris of the fin de siècle went to flirt with its own mortality. Its tables are coffins, its waiters are dressed as undertakers, and its macabre magic acts let the living watch themselves rot in a mirror.
The entry token promised not a drink but une entrée à la crève (“an entrance to bursting”). It is embossed iron with a skull between two tibias, number 891, engraved una entrada a la muerte (“an entrance to death”).
In Uchronic Paris, where the occult bubbles beneath the electric streetlamps, it is more than theater: it is one of the thin doors between the visible city and what moves beneath it. Those seeking the city’s underworld often begin by buying this token.
See also
- Circle of the Serpent, the underworld that such venues border