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.
It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? And do you hear with me again the twang of guitars come out the hedges of the Avenue Marigny? And do you smell with me the rare perfume of the wet asphalt and feel with me the wanderlust in the spirit soul of the Seine? Through the frost on the windows can you look out across the world and see with me once again the trysting tables in the Boulevard Raspail, a-whisper with soft and wondrous monosyllables, and can you hear little Ninon laughing and Fleurette sighing, and little Hélène (just passed nineteen) weeping because life is so short and death so long? Are you young again and do memories sing in your brain? And does the snow melt from the landscape of your life and in its place bloom again the wild poppies of the Saint Cloud roadways, telegraphing their drowsy, content through the evening air to Paris?