The American notion of Paris under the guardianship of the French stars, of Paris caressed by the night wind come down from Longchamps and filtered through the chestnut branches of Boulogne, is usually achieved from the Sons of Moses who, in spats and sticks, adorn the entrance of the Olympia and the sidewalks of the Café de la Paix and interrogatively guide-sir the passing foreign mob. This Paris consists chiefly of a view of the exotic bathtub of the good King Edward of Britain, quondam Prince of Wales, in the celebrated house of the crystal staircase in the Rue Chabanais, of one of the two "mysterious" midinette speak-easys in the dark Rue de Berlin (where the midinettes range from the tender age of forty-five to fifty), of the cellar of the tavern near the Panthéon with its tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked floors--of tawdry resorts and tawdrier peoples.
Do I treat of but a single class of Americans? Well, maybe so. But the other class--and the class after that--think you _these_ are so different? So different, goes my meaning, in the matter of appropriating to themselves something of the deep and very true romance that sings still in the shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia of capitals, that sounds still, as sounds some far-off steamboat whistle wail in the death-quiet of night, pleading and pathetic, that calls still to the dreamers of all the world from out the tomb of faded triumphs and forgotten memories?
True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory--gone that Paris that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul. True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd of other days--Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them--is no more. Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him of the line of François Villon--now become a place for the vulgar oglings of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gone the wild loves, the bravuras, the _camaraderie_ of warm night skies in the old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a strident concatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer," with its ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel," with its "grotto" smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Néant," with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visiting doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy _grimpants_ and wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the attendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song of Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from the heart of St. Germain. "Tea rooms," operated by American old maids, have poked their noses into these once genuine boulevards ... and, as if giving a further fillip to the scenery, clothing shops with windows haughtily revealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, postcard shops laden to the sill's edge with lithographs disclosing erstwhile _Saturday Evening Post_ cover heroines, and case upon case displaying in lordly enthusiasm the choicest cranial confections of the house of Stetson....