text: Move to Arcueil In 1898, in search of somewhere cheaper and quieter than Montmartre, Satie moved to a room in the southern suburbs, in the commune of Arcueil-Cachan, eight kilometres (five miles) from the centre of Paris. This remained his home for the rest of his life. No visitors were ever admitted. He joined a radical socialist party (he later switched his membership to the Communist Party), but adopted a thoroughly bourgeois image: the biographer Pierre-Daniel Templier, writes, "With his umbrella and bowler hat, he resembled a quiet school teacher. Although a Bohemian, he looked very dignified, almost ceremonious".
  Satie earned a living as a cabaret pianist, adapting more than a hundred compositions of popular music for piano or piano and voice, adding some of his own. The most popular of these were , text by Henry Pacory; , text by Vincent Hyspa; , a waltz; La Diva de l'Empire, text by Dominique Bonnaud/Numa Blès; , a march; , text by Contamine de Latour (lost, but the music later reappears in ); and others. In his later years Satie rejected all his cabaret music as vile and against his nature. Only a few compositions that he took seriously remain from this period: Jack in the Box, music to a pantomime by Jules Depaquit (called a "" by Satie); , a short comic opera to a text by "Lord Cheminot" (Latour);  (The Dreamy Fish), piano music to accompany a lost tale by Cheminot, and a few others that were mostly incomplete. Few were presented, and none published at the time.