It has occurred to me that of late years—I mean the years immediately
before 1914—Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to
human and moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly
been less debauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the
patronage had so fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were
planning to turn it into a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did
anybody in my hearing so much as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether
it is still in existence.
The last time I was in Maxim’s—quite a dozen years ago now—a young
woman sat next to me whose story could be read in her face. She was a
pretty thing not five and twenty, still blooming, with iron-gray hair.
It had turned in a night, I was told. She had recently come from
Baltimore and knew no more what she was doing or whither she was
drifting than a baby. The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good
husband; even a child or two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and
the inevitable desertion. Left without a dollar in the streets of
Paris. She was under convoy of a noted procuress.
“A duke or the morgue,” she whimpered, “in six months.”
Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the
Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.
V
If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will
contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the
record of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marché des
Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the
restaurants.
Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly
to my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature
and art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire,
when the Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make
every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hôtel
de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the
column gone from the Place Vendôme, and everything a blight and waste;
and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a
queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete
metropolis in all the universe.
There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity
and regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety,
charm and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London
and New York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has
been greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of
intoxicants is on the decline. They are, for the first time in France,
stimulated partly by the alarming adulteration of French wines,
rigorously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws.
As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the
vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good
glass of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and
as the wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always
considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent
temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too
often the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France—even
making a fairly good beer. And then—
But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there
is anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!
Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my
day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is
but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports
of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There
are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare,
the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the
ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make
queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of
the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The
difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star
boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a
palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which
plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after
dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the
five-o’clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at
all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my
very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone
to her meals—sick from shore to shore—until the gods ordained for her a
watery, winery, flowery paradise—where the billows ceased from
troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has
sailed many times, lodged à la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and
sip her wine with perfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last
crossing a friend found her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she
had been sitting the evening before on shipboard.
“Seems hardly any motion at all,” she said, looking about her and
fancying herself still at sea, as well she might.