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.
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