At eight, the Pavillon d’Armenonville will be brilliant with a throng of diners—men in spotless shirt-fronts and women in toilets of lace and jewels—and crisp notes of the Bank of France will change hands for rich food and sparkling wine. The season for these delightful retreats of the Bois being short, the rents for them are exorbitant, and so the monde must pay the fiddler accordingly.
At the end of the Bois is the Chalet du Cycle, another restaurant with a superb garden flaming in flowers, and dotted with cozy thatched kiosks like the huts of some jungle village and dotted with tables shaded by huge red umbrellas. Here at the apéritif hour the crowd comes en bicyclette and automobile, and at night the hurrying waiters serve parties dining cozily in the glow of shaded candles. The Chalet du Cycle is a charming place in which to breakfast some sunny morning with the Seine gliding close by under the trees.
Another segment of fairy-land, even more exquisite in its mise en scène, is the Café de Madrid. Here a low, rambling, half-timbered house forms a courtyard which is as brilliant at night with the haut monde at dinner. Here, too, as at Armenonville, the carriages, entering under a gateway smothered in trailing vines, drive in past the tables. Everywhere about you there are flowers—banks of geraniums and fragrant roses. When you have dined, you can turn your armchair and watch the beauty about you and the victorias coming and going.
It is characteristic for Parisians to sit for hours over dinner. The Café de Madrid at night resembles closely a garden party given at the château of some private estate. It is the absence of the feeling of publicity that makes it so charming.
And after all this restful luxury there is the cool Bois to drive in, through forest alleys with the smell of the fresh woods all about and the sparkle of stars overhead.
Who will ever tell the history of this famous playground of rich and poor? How many of its silent trees have sheltered and kept secret the romances of the world! How much honor has been risked for the sake of cruel, triumphant women whose hearts were tender in proportion to their needs! And how many real loves have sought it as a refuge!
If all this is sad, turn back in your drive towards the sparkling lights of the city, to Paris who is now wearing all her jewels. Some of her strings of diamonds are glittering through the vista of black trees ahead—or are these only the footlights of the great stage whereon so many comedies, so many tragedies, and so many light farces, have been played?
Chapter Three
SOME “RISQUÉ” CURTAINS WITH SERIOUS LININGS
