She was a figure of distinction in this restaurant world, for many knew her and kept track of her. I watched her from time to time talking with the guests of one table and another, and the chemical content which made her exceptional was as obvious as though she were a bottle and bore a label. To this day she stands out in my mind, in her simple dress and indifferent manner, as perhaps the one forceful, significant figure that I saw in all the cafés of Paris or elsewhere.
I should like to add here, before I part forever with this curious and feverish Parisian restaurant world, that, after much and careful observation, my conclusion has been that it was too utterly feverish, artificial, and exotic not to be dangerous and grimly destructive, if not merely touched upon at long intervals.
A GLIMPSE OF PARISIAN CAFÉ LIFE
This world of champagne-drinkers was apparently interested in only two things—the flare and glow of the restaurants, which were always brightly lighted and packed with people, and women. In the last analysis, women were the glittering attraction; and truly one might say they were glittering. Fine feathers make fine birds, and nowhere more so than in Paris. But there were many birds who would have been fine in much less showy feathers. In many instances they craved and secured a demure simplicity which was even more destructive than the flaring costumes of the demi-monde. It was strange to see American innocence, the products of Petosky, Michigan, and Hannibal, Missouri, cheek by jowl with the most daring and the most flagrant women that the great metropolis could produce. I did not know until later how hard some of these women were, how schooled in vice, how weary of everything save this atmosphere of festivity and the privilege of wearing beautiful clothes. It was a scorching lesson, and it displayed vice as an upper and a nether millstone between which youth and beauty are ground or pressed quickly to a worthless mass. I would defy anybody to live in this atmosphere as long as five years and not exhibit strongly the telltale marks of decay.
Most people come here for a night or two, or a month or two, or once in a year or so, and then return to the comparatively dull world from which they emanated, which is fortunate. If they were here a little while, this deceptive world of delight would lose all its glamour; for in a very few days you see through the dreary mechanism by which it is produced: the browbeating of shabby waiters by greedy managers, the extortionate charges and tricks by which money is lured from the pockets of the unwary, the wretched rooms and garrets from which some of these butterflies emanate, to wing here in seeming delight and then disappear. When the natural glow of youth has gone, then come powder and paint for the face, belladonna for the eyes, rouge for the lips, palms, and nails, and perfumes and ornament and the glitter of good clothing; but underneath it all one reads the weariness of the eye, the sickening distaste for bargaining hour by hour and day by day, the cold mechanism of what was once natural, instinctive coquetry.
You feel constantly that many of these women would sell their souls for one last hour of delight, and that some of them would then gladly take poison, as many of them doubtless do, to end it all.
Consumption, cocaine, and opium maintain their persistent toll. This is a furnace of desire, this Montmartre district, and it burns furiously with a hard, white-hot flame until there is nothing left save black cinders and white ashes. Those who can endure its consuming heat are quite welcome to its wonders until emotion and feeling and beauty are no more.
