The man who goes to Paris for a summer must be a very misanthropic and churlish individual if he tires of the boulevards in that short period. There is no place so amusing for the stranger between the hours of six and seven and eleven and one as these same boulevards; but to the Parisian what a bore it must become! That is, what a bore it would become to any one save a Parisian! To have the same fat man with the sombrero and the waxed mustache snap patent match-boxes in your face day after day and night after night, and to have "Carnot at Longchamps" taking off his hat and putting it on again held out for your inspection for weeks, and to seek the same insipid silly faces of boys with broad velvet collars and stocks, which they believe are worn by Englishmen, and the same pompous gentlemen who cut their white goatees as do military men of the Second Empire, and who hope that the ruddiness of their cheeks, which is due to the wines of Burgundy, will be attributed to the suns of Tunis and Algiers. And the same women, the one with the mustache and the younger one with the black curl, and the hundreds of others, silent and panther-like, and growing obviously more ugly as the night grows later and the streets more deserted. If any one aspires to be known among such as these, his aspirations are easily gratified. He can have his heart's desire; he need only walk the boulevards for a week, and he will be recognized as a boulevardier. It is a cheap notoriety, purchased at the expense of the easy exercise of walking, and the cost of some few glasses of "bock," with a few cents to the waiter. There is much excuse for the visitor; he is really to be envied; it is all new and strange and absurd to him; but what an old, old story it must be to the boulevardier!
[Illustration: "TES DANS LA RUE, VA, T'ES CHEZ TOI"]
The visitor, perhaps, has never sat out-of-doors before and taken his ease on the sidewalk. Yet it seems a perfectly natural thing to do, until he imagines himself doing the same thing at home. There was a party of men and women from New York sitting in front of the Café de la Paix one night after the opera, and enjoying themselves very much, until one of them suggested their doing the same thing the next month at home. "We will all take chairs," he said, "and sit at the corner of Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway at twelve o'clock at night and drink bock-bier," and the idea was so impossible that the party promptly broke up and went to their hotels.