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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