I, Too, Had Thought That;
But Wait, Just Wait, Until You Have Seen A Maitre D'hotel On The
Avenue De
L'Opera, with the smile of the canary-fed cat on his
face, standing just behind a hide-and-tallow baron
Or a guano duke
from somewhere in Far Spiggottyland, watching this person as he
wades into the fresh fruit - checking off on his fingers each blushing
South African peach at two francs the bite, and each purple cluster
of hothouse grapes at one franc the grape. That spectacle, believe
me, is worth the money every time.
There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter
love and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling
scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large,
broad negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront
full of yellow diamonds. 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. Days spent here seem short days;
but that may be due in some part to the difference between our
time and theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six
hours earlier than it does in America.
The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on
beyond them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored
instincts, all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards
and their grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white
to the eye in the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's
Fair as we know such things in America. Seeing them I knew where
the architects who designed the main approaches and the courts of
honor for all our big expositions got their notions for color
schemes and statuary effects. I liked better those two ancient
triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the Boulevard
St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous sweep
of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares
in the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I
reckon.
The Paris to which these things properly appertain is at its very
best and brightest on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the parks where
well-to-do people drive or ride, and their children play among the
trees under the eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of
Normandy, though, for all I know, it may be Picardy.
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