To Make It Harder For Me They Had Put It Around A
Corner In An Elbow-Shaped Wing Of The Building And Had Taken The
Sign Off The Door.
This place was full of porters and loud cries.
To be on the safe side I tendered retaining fees
To three of the
porters; and thus by the time I had satisfied the customs officials
that I had no imported spirits or playing cards or tobacco or soap,
or other contraband goods, and had cleared our baggage and started
for the cabstand, we amounted to quite a stately procession and
attracted no little attention as we passed along. But the tips I
had to hand out before the taxi started would stagger the human
imagination if I told you the sum total.
There are few finer things than to go into Paris for the first
time on a warm, bright Saturday night. At this moment I can think
of but one finer thing - and that is when, wearied of being short-changed
and bilked and double-charged, and held up for tips or tribute
at every step, you are leaving Paris on a Saturday night - or, in
fact, any night.
Those first impressions of the life on the boulevards are going
to stay in my memory a long, long time - the people, paired off at
the tables of the sidewalk cafes, drinking drinks of all colors;
a little shopgirl wearing her new, cheap, fetching hat in such a
way as to center public attention on her head and divert it from
her feet, which were shabby; two small errand boys in white aprons,
standing right in the middle of the whirling, swirling traffic,
in imminent peril of their lives, while one lighted his cigarette
butt from the cigarette butt of his friend; a handful of roistering
soldiers, singing as they swept six abreast along the wide, rutty
sidewalk; the kiosks for advertising, all thickly plastered over
with posters, half of which should have been in an art gallery and
the other half in a garbage barrel; a well-dressed pair, kissing
in the full glare of a street light; an imitation art student, got
up to look like an Apache, and - no doubt - plenty of real Apaches
got up to look like human beings; a silk-hatted gentleman, stopping
with perfect courtesy to help a bloused workman lift a baby-laden
baby carriage over an awkward spot in the curbing, and the workingman
returning thanks with the same perfect courtesy; our own driver,
careening along in a manner suggestive of what certain East Side
friends of mine would call the Chariot Race from Ben Hirsch; and
a stout lady of the middle class sitting under a cafe awning
caressing her pet mole.
To the Belgian belongs the credit of domesticating the formerly
ferocious Belgian hare, and the East Indian fakir makes a friend
and companion of the king cobra; but it remained for those ingenious
people, the Parisians, to tame the mole, which other races have
always regarded as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning
little companion of it and spend hours stroking its fleece.
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