Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

Chapter XV. Symptoms of the Disease

The majority of these all-night places in Paris are singularly and monotonously alike. In the early hours of the evening the musicians rest from their labors; the regular habitues lay aside their air of professional abandon; with true French frugality the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the garcons flit hither and yon, and all is excitement.

Enter the opulent American gentleman. Half a dozen functionaries greet him rapturously, bowing before his triumphant progress. Others relieve him of his hat and his coat, so that he cannot escape prematurely. A whole reception committee escorts him to a place of honor facing the dancing arena. The natives of the quarter stand in rows in the background, drinking beer or nothing at all; but the distinguished stranger sits at a front table and is served with champagne, and champagne only. It is inferior champagne; but because it is labeled American Brut—what ever that may denote—and because there is a poster on the bottle showing the American flag in the correct colors, he pays several times its proper value for it. From far corners and remote recesses coryphees and court jesters swarm forth to fawn on him, bask in his presence, glory in his smile—and sell him something. The whole thing is as mercenary as passing the hat. Cigarette girls, flower girls and bonbon girls, postcard venders and confetti dispensers surround him impenetrably, taking him front, rear, by the right flank and the left; and they shove their wares in his face and will not take No for an answer; but they will take anything else.

Two years ago at a hunting camp in North Carolina, I thought I had met the creature with the most acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too—had a colt every year—but in her affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has a large membership among humans.

Riding behind Pearl you uttered the talismanic word in the thinnest thread of a whisper and instantly she stopped. You could spell Whoa! on your fingers, and she would stop. You could take a pencil and a piece of paper out of your pocket and write down Whoa!—and she would stop; but, compared with a sample assortment of these cabaret satellites, Pearl would have seemed deaf as a post. Clear across a hundred-foot dance-hall they catch the sound of a restless dollar turning over in the fob pocket of an American tourist.

And they come a-running and get it. Under the circumstances it requires self-hypnotism of a high order, and plenty of it, to make an American think he is enjoying himself. Still, he frequently attains to that happy comsummation. To begin with, is he not in Gay Paree?—as it is familiarly called in Rome Center and all points West? He is! Has he not kicked over the traces and cut loose with intent to be oh, so naughty for one naughty night of his life? Such are the facts. Finally, and herein lies the proof conclusive, he is spending a good deal of money and is getting very little in return for it. Well, then, what better evidence is required? Any time he is paying four or five prices for what he buys and does not particularly need it—or want it after it is bought—the average American can delude himself into the belief that he is having a brilliant evening. This is a racial trait worthy of the scientific consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg and other students of our national psychology. So far the Munsterberg school has overlooked it—but the canny Parisians have not. They long ago studied out every quirk and wriggle of it, and capitalized it to their own purpose. Liberality! Economy! Frugality!—there they are, everywhere blazoned forth—Liberality for you, Economy and Frugality for them. Could anything on earth be fairer than that?

Even so, the rapturous reception accorded to a North American pales to a dim and flickery puniness alongside the perfect riot and whirlwind of enthusiasm which marks the entry into an all-night place of a South American. Time was when, to the French understanding, exuberant prodigality and the United States were terms synonymous; that time has passed. Of recent years our young kinsmen from the sister republics nearer the Equator and the Horn have invaded Paris in numbers, bringing their impulsive temperaments and their bankrolls with them. Thanks to these young cattle kings, these callow silver princes from Argentina and Brazil, from Peru and from Ecuador, a new and more gorgeous standard for money wasting has been established. You had thought, perchance, there was no rite and ceremonial quite so impressive as a head waiter in a Fifth Avenue restaurant squeezing the blood out of a semi-raw canvasback in a silver duck press for a free spender from Butte or Pittsburgh. 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.