Symptoms of the Disease
The majority of these all-night places in Paris are singularly and
monotonously alike. In the early hours of the evening the musicians
rest from their labors; the regular habitues lay aside their air of
professional abandon; with true French frugality the lights burn dim and
low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike
up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money
has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the
garcons flit hither and yon, and all is excitement.
Enter the opulent American gentleman. Half a dozen functionaries greet
him rapturously, bowing before his triumphant progress. Others relieve
him of his hat and his coat, so that he cannot escape prematurely. A
whole reception committee escorts him to a place of honor facing
the dancing arena. The natives of the quarter stand in rows in the
background, drinking beer or nothing at all; but the distinguished
stranger sits at a front table and is served with champagne, and
champagne only. It is inferior champagne; but because it is labeled
American Brut--what ever that may denote--and because there is a poster
on the bottle showing the American flag in the correct colors, he pays
several times its proper value for it. From far corners and remote
recesses coryphees and court jesters swarm forth to fawn on him, bask
in his presence, glory in his smile--and sell him something. The whole
thing is as mercenary as passing the hat. Cigarette girls, flower girls
and bonbon girls, postcard venders and confetti dispensers surround him
impenetrably, taking him front, rear, by the right flank and the left;
and they shove their wares in his face and will not take No for an
answer; but they will take anything else.
Two years ago at a hunting camp in North Carolina, I thought I had met
the creature with the most acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I
refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color
and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was
a reliable family animal too--had a colt every year--but in her
affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life
listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted
backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has
a large membership among humans.
Riding behind Pearl you uttered the talismanic word in the thinnest
thread of a whisper and instantly she stopped. You could spell Whoa! on
your fingers, and she would stop. You could take a pencil and a piece of
paper out of your pocket and write down Whoa!--and she would stop; but,
compared with a sample assortment of these cabaret satellites, Pearl
would have seemed deaf as a post. Clear across a hundred-foot dance-hall
they catch the sound of a restless dollar turning over in the fob pocket
of an American tourist.
And they come a-running and get it. Under the circumstances it requires
self-hypnotism of a high order, and plenty of it, to make an American
think he is enjoying himself. Still, he frequently attains to that
happy comsummation. To begin with, is he not in Gay Paree?--as it is
familiarly called in Rome Center and all points West? He is! Has he not
kicked over the traces and cut loose with intent to be oh, so naughty
for one naughty night of his life? Such are the facts. Finally, and
herein lies the proof conclusive, he is spending a good deal of money
and is getting very little in return for it. Well, then, what better
evidence is required? Any time he is paying four or five prices for
what he buys and does not particularly need it--or want it after it is
bought--the average American can delude himself into the belief that
he is having a brilliant evening. This is a racial trait worthy of
the scientific consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg and other
students of our national psychology. So far the Munsterberg school has
overlooked it--but the canny Parisians have not. They long ago studied
out every quirk and wriggle of it, and capitalized it to their own
purpose. Liberality! Economy! Frugality!--there they are, everywhere
blazoned forth--Liberality for you, Economy and Frugality for them.
Could anything on earth be fairer than that?
Even so, the rapturous reception accorded to a North American pales to
a dim and flickery puniness alongside the perfect riot and whirlwind
of enthusiasm which marks the entry into an all-night place of a
South American. Time was when, to the French understanding, exuberant
prodigality and the United States were terms synonymous; that time has
passed. Of recent years our young kinsmen from the sister republics
nearer the Equator and the Horn have invaded Paris in numbers, bringing
their impulsive temperaments and their bankrolls with them. Thanks to
these young cattle kings, these callow silver princes from Argentina and
Brazil, from Peru and from Ecuador, a new and more gorgeous standard for
money wasting has been established. You had thought, perchance, there
was no rite and ceremonial quite so impressive as a head waiter in a
Fifth Avenue restaurant squeezing the blood out of a semi-raw canvasback
in a silver duck press for a free spender from Butte or Pittsburgh. I,
too, had thought that; but wait, just wait, until you have seen a maitre
d'hotel on the Avenue de l'Opera, with the smile of the canary-fed cat
on his face, standing just behind a hide-and-tallow baron or a guano
duke from somewhere in Far Spiggottyland, watching this person as he
wades into the fresh fruit--checking off on his fingers each blushing
South African peach at two francs the bite, and each purple cluster of
hothouse grapes at one franc the grape. That spectacle, believe me, is
worth the money every time.
There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter love
and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling scion of some
rich South American family, and that is a large, broad negro pugilist
with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront full of yellow diamonds.
To an American--and especially to an American who was reared below Mason
and Dixon's justly popular Line--it is indeed edifying to behold a black
heavyweight fourthrater from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his
ease in a smart cafe, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers,
both male and female.
Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there is
another Paris besides this--a Paris of history, of art, of architecture,
of literature, of refinement; a Paris inhabited by a people with a pride
in their past, a pluck in their present, and a faith in their future; a
Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty, pious plain people; a Paris
of students and savants and scientists, of great actors and great
scientists and great dramatists. There is one Paris that might well be
burned to its unclean roots, and another Paris that will be glorified in
the minds of mankind forever. And it would be as unfair to say that the
Paris which comes flaunting its tinsel of vice and pinchbeck villainy
in the casual tourist's face is the real Paris, as it would be for a
man from the interior of the United States to visit New York and, after
interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway
ticket speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives
of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them unfit.
Yes, it would be even more unfair. For the alleged gay life of New York
touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New Yorkers,
whereas in Paris there are numbers of sane and decent folks who seem
to know nothing except by hearsay of what goes on after dark in the
Montmartre district. Besides, no man in the course of a short and
crowded stay may hope to get under the skin of any community, great or
small. He merely skims its surface cuticle; he sees no deeper than
the pores and the hair-roots. The arteries, the frame, the real
tissue-structure remain hidden to him. Therefore the pity seems all
the greater that, to the world at large, the bad Paris should mean
all Paris. It is that other and more wholesome Paris which one sees--a
light-hearted, good-natured, polite and courteous Paris--when one,
biding his time and choosing the proper hour and proper place, goes
abroad to seek it out.
For the stranger who does at least a part of his sight-seeing after a
rational and orderly fashion, there are pictures that will live in the
memory always: the Madeleine, with the flower market just alongside;
the green and gold woods of the Bois de Boulogne; the grandstand of the
racecourse at Longchamp on a fair afternoon in the autumn; the Opera
at night; the promenade of the Champs-Elysees on a Sunday morning after
church; the Gardens of the Tuileries; the wonderful circling plaza of
the Place Vendome, where one may spend a happy hour if the maniacal
taxi-drivers deign to spare one's life for so unaccountably long a
period; the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, with their exquisite shops,
where every other shop is a jeweler's shop and every jeweler's shop is
just like every other jeweler's shop--which fact ceases to cause wonder
when one learns that, with a few notable exceptions, all these
shops carry their wares on commission from the stocks of the same
manufacturing jewelers; the old Ile de la Cite, with the second-hand
bookstalls stretching along the quay, and the Seine placidly meandering
between its man-made, man-ruled banks. Days spent here seem short days;
but that may be due in some part to the difference between our time and
theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six hours earlier than
it does in America.
The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on beyond
them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored instincts,
all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their
grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white to the eye in
the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's Fair as we know such
things in America. Seeing them I knew where the architects who designed
the main approaches and the courts of honor for all our big expositions
got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better
those two ancient triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the
Boulevard St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous
sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in
the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I reckon.
The Paris to which these things properly appertain is at its very best
and brightest on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the parks where well-to-do
people drive or ride, and their children play among the trees under the
eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of Normandy, though, for all I
know, it may be Picardy. Elsewhere in these parks the not-so-well-to-do
gather in great numbers; some drinking harmless sirupy drinks at the gay
little refreshment kiosks; some packing themselves about the man who
has tamed the tree sparrows until they come at his call and hive in
chattering, fluttering swarms on his head and his arms and shoulders;
some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being
played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name--could not
find anybody who seemed to know its name--but this game is a kind of
glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball
capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes
of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem
also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have
a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and
skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers I think it counts ten
for the opposing side; but I do not know the other rules.
A certain indefinable, unmistakably Gallic flavor or piquancy savors the
life of the people; it disappears only when they cease to be their own
natural selves. A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident
of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this. The
incident she narrated was so typical that it could never have happened
except in Paris, I thought. She said she was one of a party who went
one night to dine at a little cafe much frequented by artists and art
students. The host was himself an artist of reputation. As they dined
there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face
full of flexible wrinkles; such a figure and such a face as instantly
commanded their attention. This man slid into a seat at a table near
their table and had a frugal meal. He had reached the stage of demitasse
and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and, fetching a bit of
cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and
shadings; between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who
was giving the dinner party. Not to be outdone the artist hauled out his
drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man.
Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment; and, rising
together with low bows, they exchanged pictures--each had done a
rattling good caricature of the other--and then, without a word having
been spoken or a move made toward striking up an acquaintance, each man
sat him down again and finished his dinner.
The lone diner departed first. When the party at the other table had had
their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus--one of the
common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden
buildings instead of under tents. Just as they entered, the premier
clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring. Through the
coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face: it was
the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an
hour before.
Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His
ears were painted bright red--the red ear is the inevitable badge of the
French clown--and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman
known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all
comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of
his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the
drollest master of pantomime I ever saw. On leaving the circus, very
naturally we went to the cafe--where the first part of the little dinner
comedy had been enacted. We encountered both artists, professional or
amateur, of blacklead and bristol board, but we met a waiter there who
was an artist--in his line. I ordered a cigar of him, specifying that
the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States.
He brought one cigar on a tray. In size and shape and general aspect
it seemed to answer the required specifications. The little belly band
about its dark-brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular; but no
sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with
the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died. So I
examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar,
artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the
waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the
genuine articles and had treasured it, no doubt, against the coming of
some unsophisticated patron such as I. And I doubt whether that could
have happened anywhere except in Paris either. That is just it, you
see. Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris, the Paris of petty
larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your
purse.
Go where you will, you cannot escape it. You journey, let us assume,
to the Tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the
wide-armed Hotel des Invalides. From a splendid rotunda you look down
to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high
above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte; and
above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will
and testament of him who sleeps here: "I desire that my ashes may
repose on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have so well
loved." And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his
lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of
thousands of them to massacre and mutilation and starvation; but that is
the way of world--conquerors the world over--and has absolutely nothing
to do with this tale. The point I am trying to get at is, if you can
gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are a clod. And if you can get away
from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you
are a wonder.
Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane and
polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey miles away
from this spot to the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise. You trudge
past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of monuments and
mausoleums; you view the storied urns and animated busts that mark the
final resting-places of France's illustrious dead. And as you marvel
that France should have had so many illustrious dead, and that so many
of them at this writing should be so dead, out from behind De Musset's
vault or Marshal Ney's comes a snoopy, smirky wretch to pester you to
the desperation that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture post
cards and his execrable wooden carvings.
You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that shrine
of every American who knows his Mark Twain--the joint grave [Footnote:
Being French, and therefore economical, those two are, as it were,
splitting one tomb between them.] of Hell Loisy and Abie Lard [Footnote:
Popular tourist pronunciation.] and lo, in the very shadow of it there
lurks a blood brother to the first pest! I defy you to get out of that
cemetery without buying something of no value from one or the other, or
both of them. The Communists made their last stand in Pere Lachaise.
So did I. They went down fighting. Same here. They were licked to a
frazzle. Ditto, ditto.
Next, we will say, Notre Dame draws you. Within, you walk the clattering
flags of its dim, long aisles; without, you peer aloft to view its
gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the
very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place
possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and
the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise
moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself
an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch
of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty
photographs--things which no decent man could look at without gagging
and would not carry about with him on his person for a million dollars
in cash. By threats and hard words you drive him off; but seeing others
of his kind drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in
mind except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where
the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for a
few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river and
presently you find yourself--at least I found myself there--in one of
the very few remaining quarters of old Paris, as yet untouched by
the scheme of improvement that is wiping out whatever is medieval and
therefore unsanitary, and making it all over, modern and slick and
shiny.
Losing yourself--and with yourself your sense of the reality of
things--you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses with
tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids like
hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers and
coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of song; and
on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one another like gossips
who would swap whispered confidences, is a strip of sky. Below are
smells of age and dampness. And there is a rich, nutritious garlicky
smell too; and against a jog in the wall a frowsy but picturesque
rag-picker is asleep on a pile of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on
his breast. I do not guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have
moved since I was there and saw them, although they had the look about
them both of being permanent fixtures.
You pass a little church, lolling and lopped with the weight of the
years; and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars and soft
half-lights, and twinkling candles set upon the high altar. Not even the
jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress up their holy places and
the graves of their dead can entirely dispel its abiding, brooding air
of peace and majesty. You linger a moment outside just such a tavern as
a certain ragged poet of parts might have frequented the while he
penned his versified inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet
satisfactorily answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the
snows that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.
Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall and an ancient
gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house, and
you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak a warning
and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from under the
slewed arch will issue a most gallant swashbuckler with his buckles all
buckled and his swash swashing; hence the name.
At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder. You spin on your
heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword. But 'tis not Master
Francois Villon, in tattered doublet, with a sonnet. Nor yet is it a
jaunty blade, in silken cloak, with a challenge. It is your friend of
the obscene photograph collection. He has followed you all the way from
1914 clear back into the Middle Ages, biding his time and hoping you
will change your mind about investing in his nasty wares.
With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre. You look on the
Winged Victory and admire her classic but somewhat bulky proportions,
meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must have been a mighty
hard battle the lady won, because she lost her head and both arms in
doing it. You tire of interminable portraits of the Grand Monarch,
showing him grouped with his wife, the Old-fashioned Square Upright;
and his son, the Baby Grand; and his prime minister, the Lyre; and his
brother, the Yellow Clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra. You
examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her
inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisas
has come or has passed. Wandering your weary way past acres of the works
of Rubens, and miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of
Michelangelos, and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves
of Leonardo da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see
something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the
main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you
find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry
you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small,
wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three
years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.
Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and
destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris
and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets
unaccompanied.
Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the
illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables
which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards. All
about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and a
rational and an inexpensive manner. As for yourself, all you desire is a
quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch
the shifting panorama of street life. That emphatically is all you ask;
merely that and a little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are
not.
Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk venders
cluster about you. And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar
inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados who
follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They hover about
you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes envy you for each
puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their
glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you. Very few men smoke well before
an audience, even an audience of their own selection; so before your
cigar is half finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air
the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize.
Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk
to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his
steel-pointed tool of trade.
In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and
hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to
study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train
leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy consummation of this
happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of
French timetables.
It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled
you--it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and
planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the realization
that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the
land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy--that, as Walter
Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat--and gets it
good!
So you shake the dust from your feet--your own dust, not Paris'
dust--and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train from
the station. And as the train draws away from the trainshed you
behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated
everywhere on the walls of the French capital.
One of them says: English Spoken Here!
And the other says: Liberality! Economy! Frugality!