Europe After 8:15
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H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright >> Europe After 8:15
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There below us, a crinkling tapestry of gilts, silvers and coppery
pinks, is ancient Father Thames, the emperor and archbishop of all
earthly streams. There are the harsh waters (but now so soft!) that the
Romans braved, watching furtively for blue savages along the banks, and
the Danes after the Romans, and the Normans after the Danes, and
innumerable companies of hardy seafarers in the long years following. At
this lovely turning, where the river flouts the geography books by
flowing almost due northward for a mile, bloody battles must have been
fought in those old, forgotten, far-off times--and battles, I venture,
not always ending with Roman cheers. One pictures some young naval
lieutenant, just out of the Tiber Annapolis, and brash and nosey like
his kind--one sees some such youngster pushing thus far in his light
craft, and perhaps going around on the mud of the south bank, and there
fighting to the death with Britons of the fog-wrapped marshes, "hairy,
horrible, human." And one sees, too, his return to the fleet so snug at
Gravesend, an imperfect carcass lashed to a log, the pioneer and prophet
of all that multitude of dead men who have since bobbed down this dirty
tide. Dead men, and men alive--men full of divine courage and high
hopes, the great dreamers and experimenters of the race. Out of this
sluggish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous creature, has gone forth
to his blundering conquest of the earth. And conquering, he has brought
back his loot to the place of his beginning. The great liners flashing
along their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London,
but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships,
straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung and
incredible--Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port Banana, Tang-chow,
Noumea, Sarawak. If you think that commerce, yielding to steel and
steam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to London
docks. The very names upon the street signs are as exotic as a breath of
frankincense. Mango Wharf, Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the Borneo
Stores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' Yard--on all sides are these
suggestions of adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropical moons and
cold, arctic stars, of strange peoples, strange tongues and strange
lands. In one Limehouse barroom you will find sailors from Behring
Straits and the China Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the Congo and
Labrador, all calling London home, all paying an orang-outang's
devotions to the selfsame London barmaid, all drenched and paralysed by
London beer....
The _kaiserstadt_ of the world, this grim and grey old London! And the
river of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest,
I suppose, it might be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the lower
Potomac, and no doubt the Mississippi, even at St. Louis, could swallow
it without rising a foot--but it leads from London Bridge to every coast
and headland of the world! Of all the pathways used by man this is the
longest and the greatest. And not only the greatest, but the loveliest.
Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its hills, the Amazon its
stupendous reaches. Not one of these can match the wonder and splendour
of frail St. Stephen's, wrapped in the mists of a summer night, or the
cool dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic mount, or the iron
beauty of the bridges, or the magic of the ancient docks, or the
twinkling lights o' London, sweeping upward to the stars....
PARIS
[Illustration: PARIS]
PARIS
For the American professional seeker after the night romance of Paris,
the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still a
brilliant verity. The phrase is "_une belle poire_." And its Yankee
equivalent is "sucker."
The French, as the world knows, are a kindly, forgiving people; and
though they cast the epithet, they do so in manner tolerant and with
light arpeggio--of Yankee sneer and bitterness containing not a trace.
They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand of some maundering
beggar, with commingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. For in the
Frenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood of
Lafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans, he
yet, detesting, sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled yokels,
uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of comical posturing in ostensible un-Latin
lech, vainglorious and spying--children into whose hands has fallen
Zola, children adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for those things
out of life that, groped for, are lost--that may come only as life
comes, naturally, calmly, inevitably.
But the Frenchman, he never laughs at us; that would his culture
forbid. And, if he smile, his mouth goes placid before the siege. His
attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Comstock come to the hill of
Hoerselberg in Thuringia, there to sniff and snicker in Venus's crimson
court. His attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Tristan _en
voyage_ for a garden of love and roses he can never reach. His attitude,
the attitude of an old and understanding professor, shaking his head
musingly as his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the autumnal fragrances
of life, giggle covertly over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over the
nudes of Manet, over even the innocent yearnings of the bachelor Chopin.
The American, loosed in the streets of Paris by night, however sees in
himself another and a worldlier image. Into the crevices of his flat
house in his now far-away New York have penetrated from time to time
vague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, the bold saucinesses of
the city by the Seine. And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar to
West Street after protracted cruise upon the celibate seas, to smell
out, as a very devil of a fellow, quotation-marked life and its
attributes. What is romance to such a soul--even were romance, the
romance of this Paris, uncurtained to him? Which, forsooth, the romance
seldom is; for though it may go athwart his path, he sees it not, he
feels it not, he knows it not, can know it not, for what it is.
Romance to him means only an elaborate and circumspect winking at some
perfectly obvious and duly checked little baggage; it means to him only
a scarlet-cushioned seat along the mirrored wall of the Cafe Americain,
a thousand incandescents, a string quartette sighing through "Un Peu
d'Amour," a quart of "wine." Romance to him is a dinner jacket prowling
by night into the comic opera (American libretto) purlieus of modern
Montmartre, with its spurious extravaganzas of rouge and roister, with
its spider webs of joy. For him, there is romance in the pleasure girls
who sit at the tables touching St. Michel before the Cafe d'Harcourt,
making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "_Eh,
bebe_" assails their tympani with its suggested tintinnabulation of
needed francs: for him--"models." And the Bullier, ghost now of the old
Bullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred
palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its coloured
electricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue de
l'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril. And so, too, he finds it
atop the Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, a capon of its
former self, where Germaine and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle-axes
of the Rue Victor Masse, pose as modest little workgirls of the
Batignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, the
Cafe de Paris--and in the Moulin Rouge, which died forever from the
earth a dozen years ago when the architect Niermans seduced the place
with the "art nouveau"--and amid the squalid hussies of the fake
Tabarin--and in the Rue Royale, at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestra
composed of German gipsies and its toy balloons made by the Elite
Novelty Co. of Jersey City, U.S.A.
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 Cafe 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 Pantheon 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 Francois 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 Neant,"
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....
What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, has
not yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart in
the days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouder
people. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it,
lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highways
of the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then still
somewhere. But where, ask you, is this somewhere? And I shall tell you.
This somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian girl; this somewhere is in
the heart of the Parisian man. There, romance has not died--one must
believe, will never die.
And, having told you, I seem to hear you laugh. "We thought," I would
seem to hear you say, "that he was going to tell us of concrete places,
of concrete byways, where this so gorgeous romance yet tarries." And you
are aggrieved and disappointed. But I bid you patience. I am still too
young to be sentimental: so have you no fear. And yet, bereft of all of
sentimentality, I _re_-issue you my challenge: this somewhere is in the
eyes of the Parisian girl, this somewhere is in the heart of the
Parisian man.
By Parisian girl I mean not the order of Austrian wenches who twist
their tummies in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place Pigalle, nor
the order of female curios who expectorate with all the gusto of
American drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the Forty-niners who
foregather in the private entrance of 16 Rue Frochot. I do not mean the
dead-eyed joy jades of the cafe concerts in the Champs Elysees. I do not
mean the crow-souled scows who steam by night in the channels off the
Place de la Madeleine. The girl I mean is that girl you notice leaning
against the onyx balustrade at the Opera--that one with lips of Burgundy
and cheeks the colour of roses in olive oil. The girl I mean is that
phantom girl you see, from your table before the Rotonde across the way,
slipping past the iron grilling of the Luxembourg Gardens--that girl
with faded blouse but with eyes, you feel, a-colour with the lightning
of the world's jewels. The girl I mean is that girl you catch sight
of--but what matters it where? Or what she leans against or what she
wears or what her lips and eyes? If you know Paris, you know her.
Whether in the Allee des Acacias or in the boulevard Montparnasse, she
is the same: the real French girl of still abiding Parisian romance; the
real French girl in whose baby daughter, some day, will be perpetuated
the laughter of the soul of a city that will not fade. And in whose baby
girl in turn, some day long after that, it will be born anew.
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 tete._ 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 Opera, 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 madrileno_ at Don Jose'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 _cafe a la Turque_ at Madame
Louna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than the
habitues 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 Elysees 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
Helene (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?
Or is the only rosemary of Paris that you have carried back with you
the memory of a two-step danced with some painted bawd at the Abbaye,
the memory of the night when you drank six quarts of champagne without
once stopping to prove to the onlookers in the Rat Mort that an American
can drink more than a damned Frenchman, the memory of that fine cut of
roast beef you succeeded in obtaining at the Ritz?
* * * * *
Did I mention food? Ah-h-h, the night romance of Parisian nutriment!
Parisian, said I. Not the low hybrid dishes of the bevy of
British-American hotels that surround the Place Vendome and march up the
Rue de Castiglione or of such nondescripts as the Tavernes Royale and
Anglaise--but _Parisian_. For instance, my good man, _caneton a la
bigarade_, or duckling garnished with the oozy, saliva-provoking sauce
of the peel of bitter oranges. There is a dish for you, a philter
wherewith to woo the appetite! For example, my good fellow, sole Mornay
(no, no, not the "sole Mornay" you know!), the sole Mornay whose each
and every drop of shrimp sauce carries with it to palate and nostril the
faint suspicion of champagne. Oysters, too. Not the Portuguese--those
arrogant shysters of a proud line--but the Arcachons Marennes and
Cancales _superieures_: baked in the shell with mushrooms and cheese,
and washed down exquisitely with the juice of grapes goldened by the
French suns. And salmon, cold, with sauce Criliche; and artichokes made
sentimental with that Beethoven-like fluid orchestrated out of caviar,
grated sweet almonds and small onions; and ham boiled in claret and
touched up with spinach _au gratin_. The romance of it--and the wonder!
But other things, alackaday, must concern us. _Au 'voir_, my beloveds,
_au 'voir_! _Au 'voir_ to thee, _La Matelote_, thou fair and fair and
toothsome fish stew, and to thee, _Perdreau Farci a la Stuert_, thou
aristocratic twelve-franc seducer of the esophagus! _Au 'voir_, my
adored ones, _au 'voir_.
_Voila!_ And now again are we afield under the French moon. What if no
more are the grisettes of Paul de Kock and Murger to fascinate the eye
with wistful diableries? What if no more the old Vachette of the Boul'
Mich' and the Rue des Ecoles, last of the _cafes litteraires_, once the
guzzling ground of Voltaire and Rousseau and many such another profound
imbiber? What if no more the simple Montmartroise of other times, and in
her stead the elaborate wench of Le Coq d'Or, redolent of new satin and
parfum Dolce Mia? Other times, other manners--and other girls! And if,
forsooth, Ninette and Manon, Gabrielle and Fifi, arch little mousmes of
another and mayhap lovelier day, have long since gone to put deeper soul
into the cold harps of the other angels of heaven, there still are with
us other Ninettes, other Manons and other Gabrielles and Fifis. "La vie
de Boheme" is but a cobwebbed memory: yet its hosts, though scattered
and scarred, in spirit go marching on. The Marseillaise of romance is
not stilled. In the little Yvette whose heart is weeping because the
glass case in the Cafe du Dome this day reveals no letter from her so
grand Andre, gone to Cassis and there to transfer the sapphire of the
sea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is the heart of the little Yvette
of the Second Empire. In the lips of Diane that smile and in the eyes of
Helene that dream and in the toes of Therese that dance is the smile, is
the dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris of a day bygone.
Look you with me into the Rue de la Gaite, into the
Gaite-Montparnasse, still comparatively liberated from the intrusion of
foreign devils, and say to me if there is not something of old Paris
here. Not the Superba, Fantasma Paris of Anglo-Saxon fictioneers, not
the Broadwayed, Strandified, dandified Paris of the Folies-Bergere and
the Alcazar, but the Paris still primitive in innocent and unbribed
pleasure. And into the Bobino, its sister music hall of the common
people, where the favourite Stradel and the beloved Berthe Delny,
"_petite poupee jolie_," as she so modestly terms herself, bring the
grocer and his wife and children and the baker and his wife and children
temporarily out of their glasses of Bock to yell their immense approval
and clap their hands. I have heard many an audience applaud. I have
heard applause for Tree at His Majesty's in London, for Schroth at the
Kleines in Berlin, for Feraudy at the Comedie Francaise, for Skinner at
the Knickerbocker--and it was stentorian applause and sincere--but I
have never heard applause like the applause of the audience of these
drabber halls. The thunders of the storm king are as a sonata against
the staggering artillery of approbation when Pharnel of the Montparnasse
sings "_C'est pas difficile_"; the howlings of the north wind are as
zephyrs against the din of eulogy when Marius Reybas of the Bobino lifts
a mighty larynx in "Mahi Mahi." Great talent? Well, maybe not. But show
me a group of vaudevillians and acrobats who, like this group at the
Gaite, can amuse one night with risque ballad and somersault and the
next with Moliere--and not be shot dead on the spot!
Leave behind you Fysher's, where the smirking monsieur fills the red
upholstery with big-spending American hinds by warbling into their
liquored bodies cocoa butter ballades of love and passion, and come over
to the untufted Maillol's. And hear Maillol sing for the price of a
beer. Maillol's lyrics are not for the American virgin: but, at that,
they sing laughter in place of Fysher lech. Leave behind you Paillard's,
vainglorious in its bastard salades Danicheff, its souffles Javanaise;
leave the blatant Boulevard des Italiens for the timid _bistrop_ of
Monsieur Delmas in the scrawny Rue Huygens, with its _soupe aux legumes_
at twenty centimes the bowl, its _cotelette de veau_ at fifty the plate.
A queer oasis, this, with old Delmas's dog suffering from the St. Vitus
and quivering against the tables as you eat; with its marked napkins in
a rack, like the shaving cups in a rural barber shop, one napkin a week
to each regular patron. Avaunt, ye gauds of Americanized Paris. Here are
poor and starving artists come to dine aristocratically on seventy-five
centimes--fifteen cents. Here are no gapings of Cook's; here no Broadway
prowlers. A dank hole, yes, but in its cracked plaster the sense of
Romany sunsets of yonder times. Leave behind the dazzling dance places
of theatrical Montmartre, American, and come back of the wine shop in
the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve! Leave behind the turning mill
wheel, American, and come into the Avenue de Choisy, where over a
preglacial store a couple of cornets baffle the night and set a hundred
feet in motion, feet from the Gobelin quarter, feet from the
Butte-aux-Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, than the suede feet
of the Ziegfeld Montmartre, but kicking up a different wax dust, the wax
dust of a different Paris.
* * * * *
It is springtime in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand
memories. Can you, now remote in the American winter, hear again through
the bang of the steaming radiator and the crunch on the winter's snows
the song that Sauterne sang into your heart on the terrace named after
the lilacs--on that wonderful, star-born evening when all the world
seemed like a baby's first laugh; all full of dreams and hopes and
thrilling futures? And can you rub the white cold off the panes and look
out across the Atlantic to a warmer land and see again the Gardens of
the Tuileries sleeping in the moon glow and Sacre Coeur sentinelled
against the springtime sky and the tables of the cafes along the Grand
Boulevards agog and a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of the
Ambassadeurs tucked away in the trees and the al fresco amours at
Fouquet's and the gay crowds on the Avenue de l'Opera and the massive
splendour of Notre Dame blessing the night with its towered hands and
girls shooting ebony arrows from the bows of ebony eyes? And no smell of
Child's cooking filters into the open to offend the nostril, for the
sachet of the Bois de Boulogne breeze is again on the world. Ah, Bois de
Boulogne, silent now under the slumbering heavens, where your equal?
From the Prater to the Prado, from the Cassine to Central Park, one may
not find the like of you, fairy wood of France!
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