"Veuvechters" and professional brawlers
On the Marolles side
The journalist (and old Brussels) Jacques Van Melkebeke reports, in a small book published during the last war and can not be found today ("Brussels Imageries", Maréchal, edict, Brussels, 1943.), a series of lived memories of our capital . We extract the lines that follow, highlighting the atmosphere of fights so characteristic that reigned in the Marolles district in the early years of the last century
The taste for happy violence has always manifested itself on the Rue Haute side. Who does not know, at least by name, the widowers, the guardians of the order in the dirty dance?
It is not for nothing that the windows of the police station of the main road are fenced. For formerly, when one managed to drag a wretch around, his friends tried to deliver him. Sometimes the case became so hot that only a revolver shot in the air could make room for it. In the suddenly empty street, there was nothing left to do but pick up the caps ...
The "street master of the Alexians"
"... There were times when one or the other professional brawler ruled a whole neighborhood. I remember in particular a "street master of the Alexians" who, despite his harmless air and his pallor, was prestigious. Of course, his reputation aroused jealousy.
One day when he played quietly at the "vogelpik", he entered the cafe the most terrible battler of the street of the Samaritan, a real monument of traveling flesh, who came to stand against the young man, absorbed only by the legitimate ambition of to make a rose, to jostle him with his belly and sneer: "Here, hold on, the strong! There is a hundred pounds for you! The last syllable was not finished that the man, harpooned by the setbacks, was rewarded with some dazzling head shots in the face, projected all springing on the sound pavement and completed at the heel. Infinitely classic technique. But the "master of the Samaritan street" was persevering and, three times, he tried to renew the experience that ends each time as badly.
Then, realizing clearly that if to deceive is human, to persist is diabolical, he withdrew definitively, his jaw demolished and his eyes black, murmuring: - Na kom ek nemi wije, zelle! (Now, I will not come back, do you know!)
Kick in the c ...
at "The Court of Miracles"
"... Some of the most beautiful fights in the neighborhood took place in a cabaret called" The Court of Miracles ", because of the innumerable beggars who met there: horrible old women were depraved for a quarter bock!
One night that a group of fighters had just been expelled from this pleasant establishment and finished emptying the matter in the middle of a great contest of people, I suddenly saw a prodigious kick in the ass wrong address of the promptitude of the addressee to avoid it, and an unhappy good woman who had come there as a spectator to collect it at full charge, with a hollow sound like that produced by a cardboard hat brutally smashed.
Instantly the unfortunate woman, at once stupefied and ulcerated, took her buttocks with both hands and screamed out screaming:
- Oh ! My ovaries! My ovaries ... The police arrived in the meantime and the agents dispersed the combatants in a perfect style, by sending them in full thorax unbalanced ups and downs, without listening to any explanation (...)
A herring to the daube full mouth!
A dreaded fighter, always on the hunt for a bad bargain, caused a dreary devil one night. The riotous crowd having ripped his victim from him, the disappointed matamore suddenly blamed a fifteen-year-old boy who, carrying a plate on which a herring stew was fishing, had followed the algarade with interest.
As the foaming drunkard shook him, the boy articulated:
- Lot my gerust, of ik plek men taluur of a bakkes! (Leave me alone, or I'll stick your plate to your mouth).
This had the effect, of course, to multiply the cramp of the brute. And, suddenly, with a noise like a pistol shot, the plate came crashing down on the face of the ugly dumbfounded man, the cold herring clung to his neck, while a garland of onions clung in his hair!
I have rarely heard people laugh at heart ... "
A delicious atmosphere
"... One of the cabarets near the rue du Renard was run by an incredible couple. The man, a somber stupid, drunkard and quarrelsome, the woman, athletic, virago with camouflaged nose, tattoos to the top of the thighs. In the winter, this refined person never left his counter because of the cold, and it was wonderful to see her, without interrupting the conversation, seize from time to time a container placed under the counter and serve gracefully, with a loud noise |
