I Thought This Story Was Overdrawn, But, After Traveling Over
Somewhat The Same Route Which This Fellow Countryman Had Taken, I
Came To The Conclusion That It Was No Exaggeration, But A True
Bill In All Particulars.
On the night of our second day in Paris
we went to a theater to see one of the
Topical revues, in which
Paris is supposed to excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant
vulgarity Paris revues do, indeed, excel anything of a similar
nature as done in either England or in America, which is saying
quite a mouthful.
In the French revue the members of the chorus reach their artistic
limit in costuming when they dance forth from the wings wearing
short and shabby undergarments over soiled pink fleshings and any
time the dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the
pipes a male comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a
woman. But to kick her is regarded as much the more whimsical
conceit. This invariably sets the audience rocking with uncontrollable
merriment. Howsomever, I am not writing a critique of the merits
of the performance. If I were I shou1d say that to begin with the
title of the piece was wrong. It should have been called Lapsus
Lingerie - signifying as the Latins would say, "A Mere Slip." At
this moment I am concerned with what happened upon our entrance.
At the door a middle-aged female, who was raising a natty mustache,
handed us programs. I paid her for the programs and tipped her.
She turned us over to a stout brunette lady who was cultivating a
neat and flossy pair of muttonchops. This person escorted us down
the aisle to where our seats were; so I tipped her. Alongside our
seats stood a third member of the sisterhood, chiefly distinguished
from her confreres by the fact that she was turning out something
very fetching in the way of a brown vandyke; and after we were
seated she continued to stand there, holding forth her hand toward
me, palm up and fingers extended in the national gesture, and
saying something in her native tongue very rapidly. Incidentally
she was blocking the path of a number of people who had come down
the aisle immediately behind us.
I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled
them out and exhibited them. She shook her head at that and gabbled
faster than ever. It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted
to furnish us with programs and was asking in advance for the money
with which to pay for them. I explained to her that I already
secured programs from her friend with the mustache. I did this
mainly in English, but partly in French - at least I employed the
correct French word for program, which is programme. To prove my
case I pulled the two programs from my pocket and showed them to
her. She continued to shake her head with great emphasis, babbling
on at an increased speed. The situation was beginning to verge
on the embarrassing when a light dawned on me. She wanted a tip,
that was it! She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could
see; and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she
was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in
a professional aspect; but I tipped her and bade her begone, and
straightway she bewent, satisfied and smiling. From that moment
on I knew my book. When in doubt I tipped one person - the person
nearest to me. When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons.
And all was well.
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. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that
the evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that
had - so he said - an international reputation for its supposed
sauciness and its real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might
be. Overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed
thither.
This particular cafe was found, in its physical aspects, to be
typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated,
underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas
of stale drink and cheap perfume.
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