PARIS AND THE PARISITES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 252, 21 October 1908, Page 6

PARIS AND THE PARISITES.

(By SAi-tyifc §'. pJ&TEE, 'in "Everybody's Magazine."

Paris, you Ijnpw, Is. Gay ?*»"ee. ,It is "where we go to be wicked, oh, wicked, as the dickens; where we*get expenenco of 'life" that we go home and tails about ever'afterward Wickedness that j has hot" the Parisian brand is merelypale, 'inogensive sin, but the Paris kind, j "Likewise, Paris is the best, advertised j municipality in the world. People have ■been writing about it ever since Mr- J. I Caesar came along and added the three parts .of Gaul to' bis imperial estates, wrjting about it, and throwing sidelights on the. forbidden things one can i do. there and st.iil. maintain a respectable | standing, in society, because what is for-, bidden;-elsewhere is forgotten in Paris. | They show ypu the island where" Lutetia, | the original Paris, was, and you are j quite sure that in those days the up I fortunate Frenchman who lived out mi the woods used to wink knowingly and; nod wisely when Lutetia was the subject of a talk 'and say: "It is dull here, but up j at Lutetia is where one can have his fling." And they probably went into Lutetia' in those days to have that fling, when they had accumulated the price, just as everybody nowadays goes to Paris to be devilish and debonair, and as reckless as can be imagined; to be wicked, in fine, for Paris, as we have all read, lis the wickedest place on. earth, and I the most fun.. There are a great many things to see |in Paris that are worth seeing, pictures, buildings, statues, palaces, avenues, boulevards, churches, and all that, and | most tourists see most of them, at least. Bu.t when night comes, and the lights are lit,' the centuries of Press notices begin to have their effect. It is Paris, you know, and the only way to see Paris is to sea the real Paris, after dark, with all its glories, its glitter, and its gleam. What would they think back home? Hush, you are not back home. You are in Paris, a Parisian for the time being, and, besides, what's the use of coming to Paris if you are only going to tramp through the. Louvre until your brain gets numb wondering when the old masters had any time to. eat and sleep—they painted so many pictures—and other things like that? Must a visitor to

They are hard driven, poorly paid, and i have as little fulh as any set of "work-' ing people on earth. If one' wints to | "dispossess" himself of the idea that all | : Parisians are gay, la-la-la people, it is] 'only necessary to go to the Central j j Market any morning'early and observe] I the toil and tbe fruits 'of toil one may . see there, the thousands of slaving men aaid women who buy and sell all sorts I of market supplies. They work every minute, at the hardest kind of labour, : ahd it is so in the shops and the factories and elsewhere. They I are very far from being a joyous and care-free people. For the most i part, they seem ■to be possessed with I the idea that unless they are constantly , busy they-will not have enough to buy ■ bread and cheap wine with; and they probably will not. Inside the circle, there is a perfect organisation for the acquirement of tour- ' ist money. Knowing that' the tourists 1 ; want to be wicked when they get to ' I Paris, the Parisians have provided ample 1 j opportunity, purely as business enter- - 1; prises. This core of Paris is no more ■ the real Paris than the Tenderloin is ' i the real New York, but it passes for ' j that with most people who go there, and '. the provident French, having methodii c-al minds, notwithstanding their artistic - tendencies, put on their shows, collect | their tolls, and consider it all in the 1 day's work. It is as mathematical as > the multiplication table. Ardent, im- • pulsive, artistic, volatile, mercurial Pa- ; risians! , Y<3s, all of that, but they lust • for that foreign gold with a rapacious ■ lust, and for tbe sake of it will show 1 you anything you want to he shown. 1 A Frenchman is greedier for money than > i even an Englishman. An Englishman 1 will cheat you out of an extra shilling •in the pound and congratulate himself: • |he might even deign to beat you out of '• a sixpence; but if a Frenchman cannot .. take away from you illegally a franc ', or two, he will certainly cheat you out 'of so small a sum as ten sous and con- ' sider he. has done a good stroke of I j business. '! He's thrifty, too. He can get money " j from loose-fingered Americans in the II most adroit manner, but when he gets

Paris be confined to art-galleries and old churches and to sitting in the cafes and drinking coffee and watching other tourists sitting in the cafes and drinking coffee? Certainly not! You know what you want and you go out to get it. Everybody goes along; even mamma goes to some—only some—of the places, all trembly with excitement and shivery with apprehension. Oh, such sights! the regular tourist sights: Maxim's, and the Bal Tabarin, and the Moulin Rouge, the Abbaye, the Dead Bat, the cabarets, and all the rest' of it—wicked, wicked, wicked. Then, -when you have looked it all over, and thought about it in the morning—or in the mornings, if you go more than once, as you will—you begin to have a dim suspicion that perhaps—it is just possible—it wasn't so tremendously wicked after all. It may even be that wickedness is one of the staples of Paris, sold to the tourist at so much a thrill, large supply constantly in stock, warranted up-to-date, but as artificial as i most of the diamond necklaces you saw. Well, brethren ol tne Great Association of the Stung in Paris, that is exactly what it is. The Frenchman is a shrewd and grasping person. He will sleuth a franc for hours and hours. He is not unmindful that the vast literature about Gay Paree has had its effect upon the strange beings who come from other parts of the, world padded with money, and he makes Paree gay and gets the upholstery. The wickedness the tourists rush so avidly to see is carefully planned and laid out for those tourists by the foot rule and chromatic scale. It is statistical, rectangular, blue print, specified abandon, for so much per. Draw a circle a mile or so. in diameter around the centre of Paris and there you have it all, practically; or, at least, aU the gaiety the average visitor ever sees, and more. Outside of this circle is a big, provincial city, filled with people who get up early in the morning, labour all day arid uritil late at night, and p-et un next da.v and dn it. nil nvpr arrni-n

it, it has vanished, mostly from circula- j tion. It makes a Frenchman yell with pain to spend a franc. He is not prodigal, to throw away his substance.. He buys his pleasures cheaply. He is the only person on earth who can sit in the same seat in a cafe from four o'clock in the afternoon until midnight, and have a fine time writing letters on paper the cafe, furnishes to him for nothing, consuming the whole four cents' worth of gooseberry syrup and water. Ho looks with astonishment at the strange folks from other countries who think nothing of scattering a louis or two about in a night. He cannot comprehend them. All he can do is to try to get some of the change. Presumably there are hotels in Paris where travellers from other parts of France—Frenchmen—stop. Apparently, only tourists stay at the hotels in the core. These are conducted for tourists, and priced for tourists, and they milk the tourists until the screams of rage drown the rattle of the cabs. Also, there are plenty of places where people can stay for small sums—if they want to; but the hotels in the centre of the city are not operated for that class of trade. The Paris hotolkceper in the centre has but one definite object in view, which is to get all the money he can, as quickly as he can—to take, it all at once, for he knows nobody will stop with him a second time. One opportunity for extortion that the American influx has done away with, in a great measure, is the menu card with no prices bn it. Some of the cafes do not print their prices even now, but most of them do; so when a dinner is ordered there is a chance that the diner will know within fifteen or twenty francs of what the total will be. Of course, it will be impossible for him, a traveller, to know exactly before the waiter presents the bill, for he cannot figure in the service Charges and how much the butter and 1/read cost. Nor will he ever know, until he finds it on' the bill, just what some of the distinguished food

purveyors charge for "satisfaction." That i Parisians who strut along the boulevard' may be four francs or eight francs, or !is amazing to the beholder, whatever .the host thinks ypu should j The Parisians spend hours, on their pay him for the privilege of spending i beards, and educate them into formal your money in his place. . I gardens set pieces, shrubbery, terrace, The Latin Quarter is not what it once I and vista effects. They lay out* hairwas. There is authority for that state-j scapes with them, arrange them in. tmment. Any. person who has been two jdulating meadows and twine them on consecutive weeks in Paris wfll tell you pergolas. There is the long spade conso with sobs. The lamentations of those; coetion much sought by men with black who have been there' six ppntiis are beards, which consists of about a foot of heart-rending when they relate the same hair cut square across the bottom, and

! sorrowful story. It seems to be a personal grief, some bereavement that lias ' saddened them for life. I don't know why, for the Latin Quarter seemed td be doing business when I was there. At any ! rate, there were droves of students, or . persons I took to be students, with funny | whiskers and long hair and flowing ties, land they got together at various places jin the Quarter and drank beer or wine i and sang songs and were quite studiously ; and painstakingly devil-may-care. And 1 j went to one of their balls. It was most preconceivedly riotous. Everybody seemed ;to have a particular bit. of wicked j ness—to do, and everyone did his or her I part at the right time and with all the 'outward symptoms of gusto. So far as j I can learn, the students do what they I please. If they ever did more Lban that, | then the Quarter has deteriorated. The trouble is, probably, that the persons who think it is not so gay and care-free as it once was, have grown a bit less careless and gay themselves. They have changed tbeir view-point. However, it is the proper thing to say the Quarter has gone hack. It makes people think you knowall about it. So you can hear the lamentations any time you run across a traveller. It is a passion with the Parisian to sit out on the street to take his refreshment. No Parisian is happy unless he can be seen. He sits at a cafe table, along the boulevard, when he is so cold his nose is blue, with bis feet on a charcoal warmer, and imagines he is happy. In the summer time the cafes are the wonders of the city. There are miles of them along the boulevards, with thousands of little tables, at which the Parisians and the tourists solemnly pose, mostly staring at the people who are walking by and being stared l at by them. The men who sell indecent postcards and pictures slither along the edges. The guides stand around on the corners and accost every American they see, and they see them all. "Want a guide, sir?" they whisper. IS you do not, they cheerfully tackle you next time you come along. They never make a mistake. They can tell an American half a block. " How do you do it? " I asked l one of them, and ho confided the secret. They tell Americans ■by their shoes. After that explanation it was simple enough, as anyone will admit who has ever taken note of the things the Frenchmen wear for shoes.

adds much glory to the wearer, for the whiskers always shine and glisten iri the sun. There are side-winders and pointed ones, the heart-shaped and the curved, the waved and- the plain. A. man who i can train his whiskers to grow in a new way is as much a celebrity as a man who writes a good poem or paints a good picture. There is much rejoicing when the young Parisian discovers that the beard will sprout uniformly over his face. Still, nature is coy with most of them. The usual Parisian face is fertile for whiskers only dn spots. This causes no embarrassment. It merely gives the budding .boulevardier a chance to exercise his artistic ingenuity and his loving care. Obviously, if a man's whiskers grow in patches, he can apply a different treatment, to each patch, and that is what the Parisians do, attaining a crazy-quilt consummation that is as fascinating as it is extraordinary. Among the myths about the Parisians th.i have been fastened on the world at large is the notion that they are the politest people we have. That is a good old one, but when you come to analyse it, its mythical qualities soon show. The Parisians are conversationally polite. They are the greatest artists at the deferential phrase and the obsequious bow. Actually, the Parisian is not polite. He is not even passably polite. He is discourteous and disagreeable. He walks along the streets as if he owned them, and refuses to turn out no matter what the circumstances arc. He bumps into passers-by who are used to the ordinary street courtesy, swoops upon the best seats in the public conveyances, will not budge an inch when your theatre seats are beyond him, crowds you in the restaurants and cafes, ogles every woman be meets, and is generally offensive. To be sure, if he sees a chance to get anything away from you or to advance his own interest at your expense, he says: "Pardon"—and does what he has in mind. His politeness consists of that one word, "Pardon." So far as his language goes, he is courteous. But it is all conversation. As a class the Parisian—the Parisian within the core of Paris —is a joke. He is vain, egoistic, foppish, and full of piffle. He talks about himself for hours at a time, boasts of his conquests of women, poses—without accomplishment —as a literary man or artist, parades along the i boulevards, and sits on exhibition at tao

The boulevards swarm with people from early afternoon until midnight. It is quite likely that every one, nearly, who goes to Europe walks, at. one time or another, in front of the Cafe de la Paix and down the boulevards a few times. In summer there is as much English spoken.as there is French, in the restaurants, the shops, the cafes, and along the streets. The Frenchman is an adaptable person. He knows he must speak English in order to do business, and he learns it. There is no pride of tongue or race about him. He would learn to speak Esquimaux if there were any Esquimaux business to be had. Thus the core of Paris, the tourist Paris, | the Paris that is Gay Puree, organised for and supported by foreign money, is one great conglomeration of restaurants, cafes, brasseries, hotels, moving-picture shows, theatres, phonograph parlours, shops where there are three prices—the lowest for the French, the next lowest for the English, and the highest for tho Ainerican-«-and American bars. j The gendarme is a gloomy person who stands in deep meditation in the middle of the street and awaits to arrest you fpr obstructing the traffic if a cab knocks you down, -which is proper, for you are supposed to fly from pavement to pave ment. One always wondters what the I gendarme would do with his funny little sword if he ever really got into action, but wise persons do not experiment to find out. The French soldier in heavy inarching order appears to have looted a hardware store. He is hung with pots \ and'pans from head to heel, and clinks, J as he walks, like a load) of steel rails ( going over a rocky road. His uniform I was undoubtedly invented by a bow- J legged man, for by reason of the peculiar draping of his pantaloons every French soldier's legs resemble a pair of parenthe-1 ses. I It is in Paris that the whisker reaches . itis highest state _ of cultivation and . development. The" luxuriant verdure .on the laces of soon' of the-;

1 cafes. He knows nothing about anyother • country, and cares less. His ignorance of 1 what is going on in the world is abysmal. • His idea of the. universe embraces only : the core of Paris. He is loud with talk . of his personal bravery, and runs like i a rabbit when anyone pulls his whiskers. ■ His idea of a retort to an aggressor" is to ) stand and shriek "Yah, yah, yah!" ! which is as far as he can get ia that line. To be sure, there are men in Paris ; who are great writers, great painters, • great statesmen, great lawyers, and doctors, and great merchants. But the ! Parisian who is in evidence, the Parisian j who predominates, is a joke. I But remember, that means the Parisian I who predominates ia the core. The Parisian who lives and works outside this 1 core—it would not be fair to call it a heart—is thliftyj frugal, hard-b.ee.ded, and industrious., sensible aud self-respect-ing. And the idea that all Parisians ara careless, immoral and non-domestic gets a rude shock when one goes to the parks ,on a Sunday feast day. The ordinary I Parisian, the one outside the core, goe3 picnicking with his whole family—father, mother, children and all. There are hundreds of these little family groups on any fine Sunday, eating beneath the trees or on the lawns, and playing games, they I are the people who enable the Bank of Fi-ance to maintain more gold than England and Germany have together — the most domestic people on earth.