And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies.
And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves
like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the
melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter,
with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful
and fugitive world? And do you hear with me again the twang of guitars
come out the hedges of the Avenue Marigny? And do you smell with me the
rare perfume of the wet asphalt and feel with me the wanderlust in the
spirit soul of the Seine? Through the frost on the windows can you look
out across the world and see with me once again the trysting tables in
the Boulevard Raspail, a-whisper with soft and wondrous monosyllables,
and can you hear little Ninon laughing and Fleurette sighing, and little
Hélène (just passed nineteen) weeping because life is so short and death
so long? Are you young again and do memories sing in your brain? And
does the snow melt from the landscape of your life and in its place
bloom again the wild poppies of the Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphing
their drowsy, content through the evening air to Paris?
Or is the only rosemary of Paris that you have carried back with you
the memory of a two-step danced with some painted bawd at the Abbaye,
the memory of the night when you drank six quarts of champagne without
once stopping to prove to the onlookers in the Rat Mort that an American
can drink more than a damned Frenchman, the memory of that fine cut of
roast beef you succeeded in obtaining at the Ritz?
* * * * *
Did I mention food? Ah-h-h, the night romance of Parisian nutriment!
Parisian, said I. Not the low hybrid dishes of the bevy of
British-American hotels that surround the Place Vendôme and march up the
Rue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts as the Tavernes Royale and
Anglaise--but _Parisian_. For instance, my good man, _caneton à la
bigarade_, or duckling garnished with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauce
of the peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for you, a philter
wherewith to woo the appetite! For example, my good fellow, sole Mornay
(no, no, not the "sole Mornay" you know!), the sole Mornay whose each
and every drop of shrimp sauce carries with it to palate and nostril the
faint suspicion of champagne. Oysters, too. Not the Portuguese--those
arrogant shysters of a proud line--but the Arcachons Marennes and
Cancales _supérieures_: baked in the shell with mushrooms and cheese,
and washed down exquisitely with the juice of grapes goldened by the
French suns. And salmon, cold, with sauce Criliche; and artichokes made
sentimental with that Beethoven-like fluid orchestrated out of caviar,
grated sweet almonds and small onions; and ham boiled in claret and
touched up with spinach _au gratin_. The romance of it--and the wonder!
But other things, alackaday, must concern us. _Au 'voir_, my beloveds,
_au 'voir_! _Au 'voir_ to thee, _La Matelote_, thou fair and fair and
toothsome fish stew, and to thee, _Perdreau Farci à la Stuért_, thou
aristocratic twelve-franc seducer of the esophagus! _Au 'voir_, my
adored ones, _au 'voir_.
_Voilà!_ And now again are we afield under the French moon. What if no
more are the grisettes of Paul de Kock and Murger to fascinate the eye
with wistful diableries? What if no more the old Vachette of the Boul'
Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles, last of the _cafés littéraires_, once the
guzzling ground of Voltaire and Rousseau and many such another profound
imbiber? What if no more the simple Montmartroise of other times, and in
her stead the elaborate wench of Le Coq d'Or, redolent of new satin and
parfum Dolce Mia? Other times, other manners--and other girls! And if,
forsooth, Ninette and Manon, Gabrielle and Fifi, arch little mousmés of
another and mayhap lovelier day, have long since gone to put deeper soul
into the cold harps of the other angels of heaven, there still are with
us other Ninettes, other Manons and other Gabrielles and Fifis. "La vie
de Bohéme" is but a cobwebbed memory: yet its hosts, though scattered
and scarred, in spirit go marching on. The Marseillaise of romance is
not stilled. In the little Yvette whose heart is weeping because the
glass case in the Café du Dôme this day reveals no letter from her so
grand André, gone to Cassis and there to transfer the sapphire of the
sea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is the heart of the little Yvette
of the Second Empire. In the lips of Diane that smile and in the eyes of
Hélène that dream and in the toes of Thérèse that dance is the smile, is
the dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris of a day bygone.
Look you with me into the Rue de la Gaité, into the
Gaité-Montparnasse, still comparatively liberated from the intrusion of
foreign devils, and say to me if there is not something of old Paris
here. Not the Superba, Fantasma Paris of Anglo-Saxon fictioneers, not
the Broadwayed, Strandified, dandified Paris of the Folies-Bergère and
the Alcazar, but the Paris still primitive in innocent and unbribed
pleasure. And into the Bobino, its sister music hall of the common
people, where the favourite Stradel and the beloved Berthe Delny,
"_petite poupée jolie_," as she so modestly terms herself, bring the
grocer and his wife and children and the baker and his wife and children
temporarily out of their glasses of Bock to yell their immense approval
and clap their hands. I have heard many an audience applaud. I have
heard applause for Tree at His Majesty's in London, for Schroth at the
Kleines in Berlin, for Féraudy at the Comédie Française, for Skinner at
the Knickerbocker--and it was stentorian applause and sincere--but I
have never heard applause like the applause of the audience of these
drabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata against
the staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnasse
sings "_C'est pas difficile_"; the howlings of the north wind are as
zephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts
a mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi." Great talent? Well, maybe not. But show
me a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at the
Gaité, can amuse one night with risqué ballad and somersault and the
next with Molière--and not be shot dead on the spot!
Leave behind you Fysher's, where the smirking monsieur fills the red
upholstery with big-spending American hinds by warbling into their
liquored bodies cocoa butter ballades of love and passion, and come over
to the untufted Maillol's. And hear Maillol sing for the price of a
beer. Maillol's lyrics are not for the American virgin: but, at that,
they sing laughter in place of Fysher lech. Leave behind you Paillard's,
vainglorious in its bastard salades Danicheff, its soufflés Javanaise;
leave the blatant Boulevard des Italiens for the timid _bistrop_ of
Monsieur Delmas in the scrawny Rue Huygens, with its _soupe aux legumes_
at twenty centimes the bowl, its _cotelette de veau_ at fifty the plate.
A queer oasis, this, with old Delmas's dog suffering from the St. Vitus
and quivering against the tables as you eat; with its marked napkins in
a rack, like the shaving cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a week
to each regular patron. Avaunt, ye gauds of Americanized Paris. Here are
poor and starving artists come to dine aristocratically on seventy-five
centimes--fifteen cents. Here are no gapings of Cook's; here no Broadway
prowlers. A dank hole, yes, but in its cracked plaster the sense of
Romany sunsets of yonder times. Leave behind the dazzling dance places
of theatrical Montmartre, American, and come back of the wine shop in
the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève! Leave behind the turning mill
wheel, American, and come into the Avenue de Choisy, where over a
preglacial store a couple of cornets baffle the night and set a hundred
feet in motion, feet from the Gobelin quarter, feet from the
Butte-aux-Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, than the suéde feet
of the Ziegfeld Montmartre, but kicking up a different wax dust, the wax
dust of a different Paris.
* * * * *
It is springtime in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand
memories. Can you, now remote in the American winter, hear again through
the bang of the steaming radiator and the crunch on the winter's snows
the song that Sauterne sang into your heart on the terrace named after
the lilacs--on that wonderful, star-born evening when all the world
seemed like a baby's first laugh; all full of dreams and hopes and
thrilling futures? And can you rub the white cold off the panes and look
out across the Atlantic to a warmer land and see again the Gardens of
the Tuileries sleeping in the moon glow and Sacré Coeur sentinelled
against the springtime sky and the tables of the cafés along the Grand
Boulevards agog and a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of the
Ambassadeurs tucked away in the trees and the al fresco amours at
Fouquet's and the gay crowds on the Avenue de l'Opéra and the massive
splendour of Notre Dame blessing the night with its towered hands and
girls shooting ebony arrows from the bows of ebony eyes? And no smell of
Child's cooking filters into the open to offend the nostril, for the
sachet of the Bois de Boulogne breeze is again on the world. Ah, Bois de
Boulogne, silent now under the slumbering heavens, where your equal?
From the Prater to the Prado, from the Cassine to Central Park, one may
not find the like of you, fairy wood of France!
* * * * *
Romance hunter, come with me. Stomach-turned at the fat niggers dressed
up like Turks and Algerians and made to lend an "air" to the haunt of
the nocturnal belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened at the stupid
lewdities of the Rue Biot, disgusted at the brassy harlotries of the
Lapin Agil', come with me into that _auberge_ of the Avenue Trudaine
where are banned catch-coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, that
little refuge whose wall gives forth the tableau of Salis, he of the
Niagaran whiskers and the old Chat Noir, strangling the adolescent
versifiers of Montmartre, the tableau of the crimson rose of Poetry
blossoming from out their strangling pools of blood. Come with me and
sing a chorus with the crowd in the "conservatoire" of the Boulevard
Rochechouart and beat time, like the rest of it, with knife on plate,
with glass on table. Come away from the Brasserie des Sirènes of
Mademoiselle Marthe in the Faubourg Poissonnière, from the Rue Dancourt,
from the Moulin Rose in the Mazagran--from all such undiluted cellars of
vicious prostitution--if these be Paris, then West Twenty-eighth Street
in New York.
Look you, romance seeker, rather into the places of Montépin and
Eugène Sue. The moon is down. The sound of dance is stilled in the city.
So go we into the Rue Croissant, with its shaveless thuggeries and
marauding cabs. It is dark, very. And very quiet. And the sniff of
unknown things is to be had in the air. Dens of drink with their furtive
thieves ... the enigma of the shadows of the church of Saint Eustache
... slinking feet to the rear of you ... at length, the Rue Pirouette
and the sign of the angel Gabriel on the lantern before the house. Here
is good company to be found! Well do I remember the _bon-camaraderie_ of
Henri Lavérte, that most successful of Parisian burglars, of the good
Jean Darteau, that most artistic of all Parisian second story virtuosi,
of pretty Mado Veralment, who was not convicted for the murder of her
erstwhile lover Abernal, nor, at a later date, for that of her erstwhile
lover Crepeat, both of whom, so it had been rudely whispered by her
enemies, had rashly believed to desert her for another charmer. Witty
and altogether excellent folk. Indeed, I might go further from the truth
than to say that in no woman have ever I found a deeper, a more
authentic appreciation of the poetry of Verlaine than in this
Mademoiselle Mado.
So, too, up the stone steps and into the Caveau of the Rue des
Innocents ... and here--likewise a jolly party. Inquire of most persons
about Le Caveau and you will be apprised that it is a "vile hole," "a
place of the lowest order." It _is_ dirty, so much I will grant; and it
_is_ of a Brobdingnagian smell. Also, is it frequented almost entirely
by murderers, garroters, and thieves. But to say it is a "vile hole" or
"a place of the lowest order" is to say what is not true. It is
immeasurably superior to the tinselled inn of the Rue Royale. And its
habitués constitute an infinitely more respectable lodge. If the left
wall of the cavern contains its "roll of honour"--the names of all the
erstwhile noted gentlemen patrons of the establishment who have, because
of some slight carelessness or oversight, ended their days in the
company of the public executioner--I still cannot appreciate that the
list is any the less civilised than the head waiter's "roll of honour"
at the celebrated tavern in the Avenue de l'Opéra. Nor do the numerous
scribbled inscriptions on the other walls, such saucy epigrams as "To
hell with the prefect of police," "The police are damned low flea-full
dogs" and the like impress me less favourably than the scribbled
inscriptions on notes of assignation placed covertly by subsidised
waiters into the serviettes of the Callot-adorned Thaïses in the
spectacularized haunts of the Bois. The piano in Le Caveau may be
diabetic, senescent, and its operator half blind and all knuckles (as he
is), but the music it gives forth is full of the romance of Sheppard and
Turpin, of stage coach days and dark and nervous highways, of life when
life was in the world and all the world was young.
Paris when your skies are greying, how many of us know you? Do we know
your Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melodrama under the dawning
heavens, or do we know only the farce of your Montmartre? Do we know the
drama of your Comptoir, of your Rue Montorgueil, when your skies are
faintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's and
your Catélans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people is
done, see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue Mouffetard or, in the
revel of your Saturday night, do we see only the belladonna'd leer of
the drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do we hear the romance of your
concertinas setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clatter with
Terpsichore in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in Polonceau and Myrrha, or
do we hear only your union orchestra soughing through Mascagni in the
Café de Paris? Do we know the romance of your peoples or the romance of
your restaurateurs? Which? I wonder.
* * * * *
Paris has changed ... it isn't the Paris of other days ... and
Paquerette, little Easter daisy in whose lips new worlds were born to
you, little flower of France the music and perfume of whose youth are
yours still to remember through the guerrilla warfare of the mounting
years--little Paquerette is dead. And you are old now and married, and
there are the children to look out for--they're at the school age--and
life's quondam melody is full of rests and skies are not always as blue
as once they were. And Paris, four thousand miles beyond the seas--Paris
isn't what it used to be!
[Illustration: PARIS]
But Paris is. For Paris is not a city--it is Youth. And Youth never
dies. To Youth, while youth is in the arteries, Paris is ever Paris,
a-throb with dreams, a-dream with love, a-love with triumphs to be
triumphed o'er. The Paris of Villon and Murger and Du Maurier is still
there by the Seine: it is only Villon and Murger and Du Maurier who are
not. And if your Paquerette is gone forever, there is Zinette--some
other fellow's Paquerette--in her place. And to him new worlds are born
in her lips even as new worlds were born to you in the kisses of
another's yesterday ... and the music and the perfume of Zinette's youth
shall, too, be rosemary some day to this other.
The only thing that changes in Paris is the Paris of the Americans,
that foul swelling at the Carrara throat of Youth's fairyland. It is
this Paris, cankered with the erosions of foreign gold and foreign itch,
that has placed "souvenirs" on sale at the Tomb of Napoleon, that vends
obscenities on the boulevards, that has raised the price of
bouillabaisse to one franc fifty, that has installed ice cream at the
Brasserie Zimmer, that has caused innumerable erstwhile respectable
French working girls to don short yellow skirts, stick roses in their
mouths, wield castanets and become Spanish dancers in the restaurants.
It is this Paris that celebrates the hour of the apéritif with Bronx
cocktails and "stingers," that has put Chicken à la King on the menu of
the Soufflet, that has enabled the _ober-kellner_ of Ledoyen to purchase
a six-cylinder Benz, that has introduced forks in the Rue Falguiére,
that has made the _beguins_ at the annual Quat'-z-Arts ball conscious of
the visibility of their legs. It is this Paris that puts on evening
clothes in order to become properly soused at Maxim's and cast confetti
at the Viennese Magdalenes, that fights the cabmen, that sings "We Won't
Go Home Till Morning" at the Catélan, that buys a set of Maupassant in
the original French (and then can't read it), that sits in front of the
Café de la Paix reading the New York _Morning Telegraph_ and wondering
what Jake and the rest of the gang are doing back home, that gives the
Pittsburgh high sign to every good-looking woman walking on the
boulevards in the belief that all French women are in the constant state
of desiring a liaison, that callouses its hands in patriotic music hall
applause for that great American, Harry Pilcer, that trips the turkey
trot with all the Castle interpolations at the Tabarin. It is this Paris
that changes year by year--from bad to worse. It is this Paris that
remembers Gaby Deslys and forgets Cécile Sorel, that remembers Madge
Lessing and arches its eyebrow in interrogation as to Marie Leconte.
This is the Paris of Sniff and Snicker, this the Paris of New York.
But the other Paris, the Paris of the canorous night, the Paris of the
Parisians! The little studio in the Rue Leopold Robert ... Alinette and
Reine and Renée ... the road to Auteuil under the moon-shot baldaquin of
French stars ... the crowd in the old gathering place in the Boulevard
Raspail ... the music of the heathen streets ... dawn in the Gardens of
the Luxembourg....
Yes, there's a Paris that never changes. Always it's there for some one,
some one still young, still dreaming, still with eyes that sweep the
world with youth's wild ambitions. Always it's there, across the seas,
for some one--maybe no longer you and me, exiles of the years in this
far-away America--but still for some one younger, some one for whom the
loves and adventures and the hazards of life are still so all-wondrous,
so all-worth-while, so almighty. But, however old, however hardened by
the trickeries of passing decades, those who have loved Paris, those to
whom Paris has lifted her lips in youth, these never say good-bye to
her. For in their hearts sings on her romance, for in their hearts march
on the million memories of her gipsy days and nights.
THE END
* * * * *
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| Transcriber's Notes: |
| |
| Page 54: Dome amended to Dôme |
| Page 58: Kartnerring amended to Kärtnerring; italics to |
| "and" removed ("and kaisersemmln") |
| Page 75: Théresè amended to Thérèse |
| Page 76: _et al_ amended to _et al._ |
| Page 90: Yodlers _sic_ |
| Page 91: jadded amended to jaded |
| Page 103: _mässe_ and _pinçe-nez sic_ |
| Page 119: _jevousaime sic_ |
| Page 120: Catelan amended to Catélan |
| Page 122: _pére_ amended to _père_; |
| meaningfull _sic_ |
| Page 134: Montmarte amended to Montmartre |
| Page 158: _Suatés_ amended to _Sautés_ |
| Page 194: speakeasys _sic_ |
| Page 205: _violà_ amended to _voilà_ |
| Page 210: _suéde sic_ |
| Page 220: _apértif_ amended to _apéritif_ |
| |
| Where there is an equal number of instances of a word |
| being hyphenated and unhyphenated, or an equal number of |
| instances of a spelling of a word, both versions have |
| been retained: oberkellner/ober-kellner; |
| Max-Joseph-Platz/Max-Joseph-platz; and |
| Johannisberger/Johannesberger. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
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