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.
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