The American, loosed in the streets of Paris by night, however sees in himself another and a worldlier image. Into the crevices of his flat house in his now far-away New York have penetrated from time to time vague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, the bold saucinesses of the city by the Seine. And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar to West Street after protracted cruise upon the celibate seas, to smell out, as a very devil of a fellow, quotation-marked life and its attributes. What is romance to such a soul—even were romance, the romance of this Paris, uncurtained to him? Which, forsooth, the romance seldom is; for though it may go athwart his path, he sees it not, he feels it not, he knows it not, can know it not, for what it is.
Romance to him means only an elaborate and circumspect winking at some perfectly obvious and duly checked little baggage; it means to him only a scarlet-cushioned seat along the mirrored wall of the Café Américain, a thousand incandescents, a string quartette sighing through "Un Peu d'Amour," a quart of "wine." Romance to him is a dinner jacket prowling by night into the comic opera (American libretto) purlieus of modern Montmartre, with its spurious extravaganzas of rouge and roister, with its spider webs of joy. For him, there is romance in the pleasure girls who sit at the tables touching St. Michel before the Café d'Harcourt, making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "Eh, bébé" assails their tympani with its suggested tintinnabulation of needed francs: for him—"models." And the Bullier, ghost now of the old Bullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its coloured electricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue de l'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril. And so, too, he finds it atop the Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, a capon of its former self, where Germaine and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle-axes of the Rue Victor Massé, pose as modest little workgirls of the Batignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, the Café de Paris—and in the Moulin Rouge, which died forever from the earth a dozen years ago when the architect Niermans seduced the place with the "art nouveau"—and amid the squalid hussies of the fake Tabarin—and in the Rue Royale, at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestra composed of German gipsies and its toy balloons made by the Elite Novelty Co. of Jersey City, U.S.A.
The American notion of Paris under the guardianship of the French stars, of Paris caressed by the night wind come down from Longchamps and filtered through the chestnut branches of Boulogne, is usually achieved from the Sons of Moses who, in spats and sticks, adorn the entrance of the Olympia and the sidewalks of the Café de la Paix and interrogatively guide-sir the passing foreign mob. This Paris consists chiefly of a view of the exotic bathtub of the good King Edward of Britain, quondam Prince of Wales, in the celebrated house of the crystal staircase in the Rue Chabanais, of one of the two "mysterious" midinette speak-easys in the dark Rue de Berlin (where the midinettes range from the tender age of forty-five to fifty), of the cellar of the tavern near the Panthéon with its tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked floors—of tawdry resorts and tawdrier peoples.
Do I treat of but a single class of Americans? Well, maybe so. But the other class—and the class after that—think you these are so different? So different, goes my meaning, in the matter of appropriating to themselves something of the deep and very true romance that sings still in the shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia of capitals, that sounds still, as sounds some far-off steamboat whistle wail in the death-quiet of night, pleading and pathetic, that calls still to the dreamers of all the world from out the tomb of faded triumphs and forgotten memories?
True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory—gone that Paris that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul. True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd of other days—Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them—is no more. Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him of the line of François Villon—now become a place for the vulgar oglings of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gone the wild loves, the bravuras, the camaraderie of warm night skies in the old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a strident concatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer," with its ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel," with its "grotto" smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Néant," with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visiting doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy grimpants and wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the attendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song of Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from the heart of St. Germain. "Tea rooms," operated by American old maids, have poked their noses into these once genuine boulevards ... and, as if giving a further fillip to the scenery, clothing shops with windows haughtily revealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, postcard shops laden to the sill's edge with lithographs disclosing erstwhile Saturday Evening Post cover heroines, and case upon case displaying in lordly enthusiasm the choicest cranial confections of the house of Stetson....
What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, has not yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart in the days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouder people. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it, lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highways of the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then still somewhere. But where, ask you, is this somewhere? And I shall tell you. This somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian girl; this somewhere is in the heart of the Parisian man. There, romance has not died—one must believe, will never die.
And, having told you, I seem to hear you laugh. "We thought," I would seem to hear you say, "that he was going to tell us of concrete places, of concrete byways, where this so gorgeous romance yet tarries." And you are aggrieved and disappointed. But I bid you patience. I am still too young to be sentimental: so have you no fear. And yet, bereft of all of sentimentality, I re-issue you my challenge: this somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian girl, this somewhere is in the heart of the Parisian man.
By Parisian girl I mean not the order of Austrian wenches who twist their tummies in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place Pigalle, nor the order of female curios who expectorate with all the gusto of American drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the Forty-niners who foregather in the private entrance of 16 Rue Frochot. I do not mean the dead-eyed joy jades of the café concerts in the Champs Elysées. I do not mean the crow-souled scows who steam by night in the channels off the Place de la Madeleine. The girl I mean is that girl you notice leaning against the onyx balustrade at the Opéra—that one with lips of Burgundy and cheeks the colour of roses in olive oil. The girl I mean is that phantom girl you see, from your table before the Rotonde across the way, slipping past the iron grilling of the Luxembourg Gardens—that girl with faded blouse but with eyes, you feel, a-colour with the lightning of the world's jewels. The girl I mean is that girl you catch sight of—but what matters it where? Or what she leans against or what she wears or what her lips and eyes? If you know Paris, you know her. Whether in the Allée des Acacias or in the boulevard Montparnasse, she is the same: the real French girl of still abiding Parisian romance; the real French girl in whose baby daughter, some day, will be perpetuated the laughter of the soul of a city that will not fade. And in whose baby girl in turn, some day long after that, it will be born anew.
Ah, me, the cynic in you! Do you protest that the girl of the balustrade, the girl of the Luxembourg, are very probably American girls here for visit? Well, well! Tu te paye ma tête. Who has heard of romance in an American girl? I grant you, and I make grant quickly, that the American girl is, in the mass, more ocularly massaging, more nimble with the niblick, more more in several ways than her sister of France; but in her eyes, however otherwise lovely, is glint of steel where should be dreaming pansies, in her heart reverie of banknotes where should be billets doux.
And so by Parisian man I mean, not the chorus men of Des Italiens, betalcumed and odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those weird birds who are guarded by the casual Yankee as typical and symbolic of the nation. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver-faced denizens of the region down from the Opéra, those spaniel-eyed creatures who live in the tracks of petite Sapphos, who spend the days in cigarette smoke, the nights in scheming ambuscade. Nor yet the Austrian cross-breeds who are to be beheld behind the gulasch in the Rue d'Hauteville, nor the semi-Milanese who sibilate the minestrone at Aldegani's in the Passage des Panoramas, nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobble the guisillo madrileño at Don José's in the Rue Helder, nor the half-French Cossacks amid the potrokha in the Restaurant Cubat, nor the Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may be observed at moontide dawdling over their café à la Turque at Madame Louna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than the habitués of Back Bay are the Americans of Boston, no more than the Americans of Boston are—Americans.