That Gay Paresis
As you walk along the Rue de la Paix [Footnote: The X being one of the
few silent things in France.] and pay and pay, and keep on paying, your
eye is constantly engaged by two inscriptions that occur and recur with
the utmost frequency. One of these appears in nearly every shopwindow
and over nearly every shopdoor. It says:
English Spoken Here.
This, I may tell you, is one of the few absolutely truthful and
dependable statements encountered by the tourist in the French capital.
Invariably English is spoken here. It is spoken here during all the
hours of the day and until far into the dusk of the evening; spoken
loudly, clearly, distinctly, hopefully, hopelessly, stridently,
hoarsely, despondently, despairingly and finally profanely by Americans
who are trying to make somebody round the place understand what they are
driving at.
The other inscription is carved, painted or printed on all public
buildings, on most monuments, and on many private establishments as
well. It is the motto of the French Republic, reading as follows:
Liberality! Economy! Frugality!
[Footnote: Free translation.]
The first word of this--the Liberality part--is applicable to the
foreigner and is aimed directly at him as a prayer, an injunction and
a command; while the rest of it--the Economy and the Frugality--is
competently attended to by the Parisians themselves. The foreigner
has only to be sufficiently liberal and he is assured of a flattering
reception wheresoever his straying footsteps may carry him, whether in
Paris or in the provinces; but wheresoever those feet of his do carry
him he will find a people distinguished by a frugality and inspired by
an economy of the frugalest and most economical character conceivable.
In the streets of the metropolis he is expected, when going anywhere,
to hail the fast-flitting taxicab [Footnote: Stops on signal only--and
sometimes not then.], though the residents patronize the public bus.
Indeed, the distinction is made clear to his understanding from the
moment he passes the first outlying fortress at the national frontier
[Footnote: Flag station.]--since, for the looks of things if for
no better reason, he must travel first-class on the de-luxe trains
[Footnote: Diner taken off when you are about half through eating.],
whereas the Frenchmen pack themselves tightly but frugally into the
second-class and the third-class compartments.
Before I went to France I knew Saint Denis was the patron saint of the
French; but I did not know why until I heard the legend connected with
his death. When the executioner on the hill at Montmartre cut off his
head the good saint picked it up and strolled across the fields with it
tucked under his arm--so runs the tale. His head, in that shape, was no
longer of any particular value to him, but your true Parisian is of a
saving disposition. And so the Paris population have worshiped Saint
Denis ever since. Both as a saint and as a citizen he filled the bill.
He would not throw anything away, whether he needed it or not.
Paris--not the Paris of the art lover, nor the Paris of the lover of
history, nor yet again the Paris of the worth-while Parisians--but the
Paris which the casual male visitor samples, is the most overrated thing
on earth, I reckon--except alligator-pear salad--and the most costly.
Its system of conduct is predicated, based, organized and manipulated on
the principle that a foreigner with plenty of money and no soul will be
along pretty soon. Hence by day and by night the deadfall is rigged
and the trap is set and baited--baited with a spurious gayety and an
imitation joyousness; but the joyousness is as thin as one coat of
sizing, and the brass shines through the plating; and behind the
painted, parted lips of laughter the sharp teeth of greed show in
a glittering double row. Yet gallus Mr. Fly, from the U.S.A., walks
debonairly in, and out comes Monsieur Spider, ably seconded by Madame
Spiderette; and between them they despoil him with the utmost dispatch.
When he is not being mulcted for large sums he is being nicked for small
ones. It is tip, brother, tip, and keep right on tipping.
I heard a story of an American who spent a month in Paris, taking in the
sights and being taken in by them, and another month motoring through
the country. At length he reached the port whence he was to sail for
home. He went aboard the steamer and saw to it that his belongings were
properly stored; and in the privacy of his stateroom he sat down to take
an inventory of his letter of credit, now reduced to a wan and wasted
specter of its once plethoric self. In the midst of casting-up he
heard the signal for departure; and so he went topside of the ship and,
stationing himself on the promenade deck alongside the gang-plank,
he raised his voice and addressed the assembled multitude on the pier
substantially as follows:
"If"--these were his words--"if there is a single, solitary individual
in this fair land who has not touched me for something of value--if
there be in all France a man, woman or child who has not been tipped
by me--let him, her or it speak now or forever after hold their peace;
because, know ye all men by these presents, I am about to go away from
here and if I stay in my right mind I'm not coming back!"
And several persons were badly hurt in the crush; but they were believed
afterward to have been repeaters.
I thought this story was overdrawn, but, after traveling over somewhat
the same route which this fellow countryman had taken, I came to
the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all
particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a
theater to see one of the topical revues, in which Paris is supposed to
excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris revues do,
indeed, excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or
in America, which is saying quite a mouthful.
In the French revue the members of the chorus reach their artistic limit
in costuming when they dance forth from the wings wearing short and
shabby undergarments over soiled pink fleshings and any time the
dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the pipes a male
comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a woman. But to kick
her is regarded as much the more whimsical conceit. This invariably sets
the audience rocking with uncontrollable merriment. Howsomever, I am not
writing a critique of the merits of the performance. If I were I should
say that to begin with the title of the piece was wrong. It should have
been called Lapsus Lingerie--signifying as the Latins would say, "A
Mere Slip." At this moment I am concerned with what happened upon our
entrance.
At the door a middle-aged female, who was raising a natty mustache,
handed us programs. I paid her for the programs and tipped her. She
turned us over to a stout brunette lady who was cultivating a neat and
flossy pair of muttonchops. This person escorted us down the aisle to
where our seats were; so I tipped her. Alongside our seats stood a third
member of the sisterhood, chiefly distinguished from her confreres by
the fact that she was turning out something very fetching in the way of
a brown vandyke; and after we were seated she continued to stand there,
holding forth her hand toward me, palm up and fingers extended in
the national gesture, and saying something in her native tongue very
rapidly. Incidentally she was blocking the path of a number of people
who had come down the aisle immediately behind us.
I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled them out
and exhibited them. She shook her head at that and gabbled faster than
ever. It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to furnish us with
programs and was asking in advance for the money with which to pay for
them. I explained to her that I already secured programs from her
friend with the mustache. I did this mainly in English, but partly in
French--at least I employed the correct French word for program, which
is programme. To prove my case I pulled the two programs from my pocket
and showed them to her. She continued to shake her head with great
emphasis, babbling on at an increased speed. The situation was beginning
to verge on the embarrassing when a light dawned on me. She wanted a
tip, that was it! She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could
see; and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she
was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in
a professional aspect; but I tipped her and bade her begone, and
straightway she bewent, satisfied and smiling. From that moment on I
knew my book. When in doubt I tipped one person--the person nearest to
me. When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons. And all was well.
On the next evening but one I had another lesson, which gave me further
insight into the habits and customs of these gay and gladsome Parisians.
We were completing a round of the all-night cafes and cabarets. There
were four of us. Briefly, we had seen the Dead Rat, the Abbey, the Bal
Tabarin the Red Mill, Maxim's, and the rest of the lot to the total
number of perhaps ten or twelve. We had listened to bad singing, looked
on bad dancing, sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at
bad food; and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths.
We had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris was
just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called gay life
of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life and gay livers.
A scrap of the gristle end of the New York Tenderloin; a suggestion of
a certain part of New Orleans; a short cross section of the Levee,
in Chicago; a dab of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco in its old,
unexpurgated days; a touch of Piccadilly Circus in London, after
midnight, with a top dressing of Gehenna the Unblest--it had seemed to
us a compound of these ingredients, with a distinctive savor of what was
essentially Gallic permeating through it like garlic through a stew.
We had had enough. Even though we had attended only as onlookers and
seekers after local color, we felt that we had a-plenty of onlooking
and entirely too much of local color; we felt that we should all go into
retreat for a season of self-purification to rid our persons of the
one and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the
other. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that the
evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that had--so he
said--an international reputation for its supposed sauciness and its
real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might be. Overcome by his
argument we piled into a cab and departed thither.
This particular cafe was found, in its physical aspects, to be
typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated,
underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas of stale
drink and cheap perfume. As we entered a wrangle was going on among a
group of young Frenchmen picturesquely attired as art students--almost a
sure sign that they were not art students. An undersized girl dressed in
a shabby black-and-yellow frock was doing a Spanish dance on a cleared
space in the middle of the floor. We knew her instantly for a Spanish
dancer, because she had a fan in one hand and a pair of castanets in the
other. Another girl, dressed as a pierrot, was waiting to do her turn
when the Spanish dancer finished. Weariness showed through the lacquer
of thick cosmetic on her peaked little face. An orchestra of three
pieces sawed wood steadily; and at intervals, to prove that these were
gay and blithesome revels, somebody connected with the establishment
threw small, party-colored balls of celluloid about. But what
particularly caught our attention was the presence in a far corner of
two little darkies in miniature dress suits, both very wally of eye,
very brown of skin, and very shaved as to head, huddled together there
as though for the poor comfort of physical contact. As soon as they saw
us they left their place and sidled up, tickled beyond measure to behold
American faces and hear American voices.
They belonged, it seemed, to a troupe of jubilee singers who had been
imported from the States for the delectation of French audiences. At
night, after their work at a vaudeville theater was done, the members of
their company were paired off and sent about to the cafes to earn their
keep by singing ragtime songs and dancing buck dances. These two were
desperately, pathetically homesick. One of them blinked back the tears
when he told us, with the plaintive African quaver in his voice, how
long they had been away from their own country and how happy they would
be to get back to it again.
"We suttin'ly is glad to heah somebody talkin' de reg'lar New 'Nited
States talk, same as we does," he said. "We gits mighty tired of all dis
yere French jabberin'!"
"Yas, suh," put in his partner; "dey meks a mighty fuss over cullud
folks over yere; but 'tain't noways lak home. I comes from Bummin'ham,
Alabama, myse'f. Does you gen'lemen know anybody in Bummin'ham?"
They were the first really wholesome creatures who had crossed our paths
that night. They crowded up close to us and there they stayed until we
left, as grateful as a pair of friendly puppies for a word or a look.
Presently, though, something happened that made us forget these small
dark compatriots of ours. We had had sandwiches all round and a bottle
of wine. When the waiter brought the check it fell haply into the hands
of the one person in our party who knew French and--what was an even
more valuable accomplishment under the present circumstances--knew the
intricate French system of computing a bill. He ran a pencil down the
figures. Then he consulted the price list on the menu and examined the
label on the neck of the wine bottle, and then he gave a long whistle.
"What's the trouble?" asked one of us.
"Oh, not much!" he said. "We had a bottle of wine priced at eighteen
francs and they have merely charged us twenty-four francs for it--six
francs overcharge on that one item alone. The total for the sandwiches
should have been six francs, and it is put down at ten francs. And here,
away down at the bottom, I find a mysterious entry of four francs, which
seems to have no bearing on the case at all--unless it be that they just
simply need the money. I expected to be skinned somewhat, but I object
to being peeled. I'm afraid, at the risk of appearing mercenary, that
we'll have to ask our friend for a recount."
He beckoned the waiter to him and fired a volley of rapid French in the
waiter's face. The waiter batted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders;
then reversing the operation he shrugged his eyelids and batted his
shoulderblades, meantime endeavoring volubly to explain. Our friend
shoved the check into his hands and waved him away. He was back again
in a minute with the account corrected. That is, it was corrected to the
extent that the wine item had been reduced to twenty-one francs and the
sandwiches to eight francs.
By now our paymaster was as hot as a hornet. His gorge rose--his
freeborn, independent American gorge. It rose clear to the ceiling and
threw off sparks and red clinkers. He sent for the manager. The manager
came, all bows and graciousness and rumply shirtfront; and when he
heard what was to be said he became all apologies and indignation. He
regretted more than words could tell that the American gentlemen who
deigned to patronize his restaurant had been put to annoyance. The
garcon--here he turned and burned up that individual with a fiery
sideglance--was a debased idiot and the misbegotten son of a yet greater
and still more debased idiot. The cashier was a green hand and an
imbecile besides. It was incredible, impossible, that the overcharging
had been done deliberately; that was inconceivable. But the honor of
his establishment was at stake. They should both, garcon and cashier, be
discharged on the spot. First, however, he would rectify all mistakes.
Would monsieur intrust the miserable addition to him for a moment, for
one short moment? Monsieur would and did.
This time the amount was made right and our friend handed over in
payment a fifty-franc note. With his own hands the manager brought back
the change. Counting it over, the payee found it five francs short.
Attention being directed to this error the manager became more
apologetic and more explanatory than ever, and supplied the deficiency
with a shiny new five-franc piece from his own pocket. And then, when
we had gone away from there and had traveled a homeward mile or two,
our friend found that the new shiny five-franc piece was counterfeit--as
false a thing as that manager's false smile. We had bucked the
unbeatable system, and we had lost.
Earlier that same evening we spent a gloom-laden quarter of an hour in
another cafe--one which owes its fame and most of its American customs
to the happy circumstance that in a certain famous comic opera produced
a few years ago a certain popular leading man sang a song extolling its
fascinations. The man who wrote the song must have had a full-flowered
and glamorous imagination, for he could see beauty where beauty was not.
To us there seemed nothing particularly fanciful about the place except
the prices they charged for refreshments. However, something unusual did
happen there once. It was not premeditated though; the proprietor had
nothing to do with it. Had he known what was about to occur undoubtedly
he would have advertised it in advance and sold tickets for it.
By reason of circumstances over which he had no control, but which
had mainly to do with a locked-up wardrobe, an American of convivial
mentality was in his room at his hotel one evening, fairly consumed with
loneliness. Above all things he desired to be abroad amid the life and
gayety of the French capital; but unfortunately he had no clothes except
boudoir clothes, and no way of getting any, either, Which made the
situation worse. He had already tried the telephone in a vain effort
to communicate with a ready-made clothing establishment in the Rue St.
Honore. Naturally he had failed, as he knew he would before he tried.
Among Europeans the telephone is not the popular and handy adjunct of
every-day life it is among us. The English have small use for it
because it is, to start with, a wretched Yankee invention; besides, an
Englishman in a hurry takes a cab, as his father before him did--takes
the same cab his father took, if possible--and the Latin races dislike
telephone conversations because the gestures all go to absolute waste.
The French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair. You wrap
it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other end near
your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a while; and then
you slam it down and go and send a messenger. The hero of the present
tale, however, could not send a messenger--the hotel people had their
orders to the contrary from one who was not to be disobeyed.
Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk revelry
that filtered up to him intermittently, he incased his feet in bed-room
slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas, and negotiated a
successful escape from the hotel by means of a rear way. Once in the
open he climbed into a handy cab and was driven to the cafe of his
choice, it being the same cafe mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.
Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance into
this place--not that he would have been barred under any circumstances,
inasmuch as he had brought a roll with him. A person with a cluster of
currency on hand is always suitably dressed in Paris, no matter if he
has nothing else on; and this man had brought much ready cash with
him. He could have gone in fig-leaved like Eve, or fig-leafless like
September Morn, it being remembered that as between these two, as
popularly depicted, Morn wears even less than Eve. So he whisked in
handily, and when he had hidden the lower part of himself under a table
he felt quite at home and proceeded to have a large and full evening.
Soon there entered another American, and by that mental telepathy which
inevitably attracts like-spirit to like-spirit he was drawn to the spot
where the first American sat. He introduced himself as one feeling the
need of congenial companionship, and they shook hands and exchanged
names, and the first man asked the second man to be seated; so they sat
together and had something together, and then something more together;
and as the winged moments flew they grew momentarily more intimate.
Finally the newcomer said:
"This seems a pretty lachrymose shop. Suppose we go elsewhere and look
for some real doings."
"Your proposition interests me strangely," said the first man; "but
there are two reasons--both good ones--why I may not fare forth with
you. Look under the table and you'll see 'em."
The second man looked and comprehended, for he was a married man
himself; and he grasped the other's hand in warm and comforting
sympathy.
"Old Man," he said--for they had already reached the Old Man
stage--"don't let that worry you. Why, I've got more pants than any man
with only one set of legs has any right to have. I've got pants that've
never been worn. You stay right here and don't move until I come back.
My hotel is just round the corner from here."
No sooner said than done. He went and in a surprisingly short time was
back, bearing spare trousers with him. Beneath the shielding protection
of the table draperies the succored one slipped them on, and they were
a perfect fit. Now he was ready to go where adventure might await them.
They tarried, though, to finish the last bottle.
Over the rim of his glass the second man ventured an opinion on a topic
of the day. Instantly the first man challenged him. It seemed to him
inconceivable that a person with intelligence enough to have amassed so
many pairs of trousers should harbor such a delusion. He begged of his
new-found friend to withdraw the statement, or at least to abate it. The
other man was sorry, but he simply could not do it. He stood ready
to concede almost anything else, but on this particular point he was
adamant; in fact, adamant was in comparison with him as pliable
as chewing taffy. Much as he regretted it, he could not modify his
assertion by so much as one brief jot or one small tittle without
violating the consistent principles of a consistent life. He felt that
way about it. All his family felt that way about it.
"Then, sir," said the first man with a rare dignity, "I regret to wound
your feelings; but my sensibilities are such that I cannot accept, even
temporarily, the use of a pair of trousers from the loan collection of
a person who entertains such false and erroneous conceptions. I have the
pleasure, sir, of wishing you good night."
With these words he shucked off the borrowed habiliments and slammed
them into the abashed bosom of the obstinate stranger and went back to
his captivity--pantless, 'tis true, but with his honor unimpaired.