Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

It was not long after that before we had another streak of luck. The train jolted over something and a hat fell down from the topmost pinnacle of the mountain of luggage above and hit his friend on the nose. We should have felt better satisfied if it had been a coal scuttle; but it was a reasonably hard and heavy hat and it hit him brim first on the tenderest part of his nose and made his eyes water, and we were grateful enough for small blessings. One should not expect too much of an already overworked Providence.

The rest of us were still warm and happy in our souls when, without any whistle-tooting or bell-clanging or station-calling, we slid silently, almost surreptitiously, into the Gare du Nord, at Paris. Neither in England nor on the mainland does anyone feel called on to notify you that you have reached your destination.

It is like the old formula for determining the sex of a pigeon—you give the suspected bird some corn, and if he eats it he is a he; but if she eats it she is a she. In Europe if it is your destination you get off, and if it is not your destination you stay on. On this occasion we stayed on, feeling rather forlorn and helpless, until we saw that everyone else had piled off. We gathered up our belongings and piled off too.

By that time all the available porters had been engaged; so we took up our luggage and walked. We walked the length of the trainshed—and then we stepped right into the recreation hall of the State Hospital for the Criminal Insane, at Matteawan, New York. I knew the place instantly, though the decorations had been changed since I was there last. It was a joy to come on a home institution so far from home—joysome, but a trifle disconcerting too, because all the keepers had died or gone on strike or something; and the lunatics, some of them being in uniform and some in civilian dress, were leaping from crag to crag, uttering maniacal shrieks.

Divers lunatics, who had been away and were just getting back, and sundry lunatics who were fixing to go away and apparently did not expect ever to get back, were dashing headlong into the arms of still other lunatics, kissing and hugging them, and exchanging farewells and sacre-bleuing with them in the maddest fashion imaginable. From time to time I laid violent hands on a flying, flitting maniac and detained him against his will, and asked him for some directions; but the persons to whom I spoke could not understand me, and when they answered I could not understand them; so we did not make much headway by that. I could not get out of that asylum until I had surrendered the covers of our ticket books and claimed our baggage and put it through the customs office. I knew that; the trouble was I could not find the place for attending to these details. On a chance I tried a door, but it was distinctly the wrong place; and an elderly female on duty there got me out by employing the universal language known of all peoples. She shook her skirts at me and said Shoo! So I got out, still toting five or six bags and bundles of assorted sizes and shapes, and tried all the other doors in sight.

Finally, by a process of elimination and deduction, I arrived at the right one. 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. This particular mole belonging to the stout middle-aged lady in question was one of the largest moles and one of the curliest I ever saw. It was on the side of her nose.

You see a good deal of mole culture going on here. Later, with the reader's permission, we shall return to Paris and look its inhabitants over at more length; but for the time being I think it well for us to be on our travels. In passing I would merely state that on leaving a Paris hotel you will tip everybody on the premises.