INSIDE COLUMBIN'S
Two gendarmes, with their capes folded and thrown over their shoulders, come in and stand with the waiters, surveying the rehearsal with critical disapproval, and the woman who collects the pennies for the iron seats in the avenue takes a few moments' recess, and brings with her two nurse-maids, with their neglected charges swinging by the silken straps around their silken bodies. And so they all stand at one side and gaze with large eyes at the breathless, laughing young woman on the stage above them, who runs and kicks and runs back and kicks again, reflected many times in the background of mirrors around her; and then the two American song-and-dance men, and the English acrobats, and the Italian who owns the performing dogs, and the smooth-faced French comédiennes, and all the idle gentlemen with glasses of bock before them, sit up as though some one had touched their shoulders with a whip, and all the actresses smile politely, and look with pressed lips and half-closed eyes at a very tall woman with red hair, who walks erectly down the stage with a roll of music in her gloved hands. This is Yvette Guilbert, the most artistic and the most improper of all the women of the cafés chantants. She is also the most graceful. You can see that even now when she is off her guard. She could not make an ungraceful gesture even after long practice, and when she shudders and jumps at a false note from the orchestra she is still graceful.
When the rehearsal is finished you can cross the Place de la Concorde and hang over the stone parapet, and watch the Deputies coming over the bridge, or the men washing the dogs in the Seine, and shaving and trimming their tufts of curly hair, and twisting their mustaches into military jauntiness; or you can turn your back to this and watch the thousands of carriages and cabs and omnibuses crossing the great square before you from the eight streets opening into it, with the water of the fountains in the middle blown into spray by the wind, and turned into the colors of the rainbow by the sun. This great, beautiful open place, even to one accustomed to city streets and their monuments, seems to change more rapidly and to form with greater life than any other spot in the world, and its great stupid obelisk in the centre appears to rise like a monster exclamation-point of wonder at what it sees about it, and with the surprise over all of finding itself in the centre of it.
"AND YOU BELIEVE THE GUIDES"
You cannot say you have seen the streets of Paris until you have walked them at sunrise; every one has seen them at night, but he must watch them change from night to day before he can claim to have seen them at their best. I walked under the arches of the Rue de Rivoli one morning when it was so dark that they looked like the cloisters of some great monastery, and it was impossible to believe that the empty length of the Rue Cambon had but an hour before been blocked by the blazing front of the Olympia, and before that with rows of carriages in front of the two Columbins. There were a few belated cabs hugging the sidewalk, with their drivers asleep on the boxes, and a couple of gendarmes slouching together across the Place de la Concorde made the only sound of life in the whole city. The Seine lay as motionless as water in a bath-tub, and the towers of Notre Dame rising out of the mist at one end, and the round bulk of the Trocadéro bounding it at the other, seemed to limit the river to what one could see of its silent surface from the Bridge of the Deputies. The Eiffel Tower, the great skeleton of the departed exposition, disappeared and reformed itself again as drifting clouds of mist swept through it and cut its great ugly length into fragments hung in mid-air. As the light grew in strength the façades of the government buildings grew in outline, as though one were focussing them through an opera-glass, and the pillars of the Madeleine took form and substance; then the whole great square showed itself, empty and deserted. The darkness had hidden nothing more terrible than the clean asphalt and the motionless statues of the cities of France.
A solitary fiacre passed me slowly with no one on the box, but with the coachman sitting back in his cab. He was returning to the stables, evidently, and had on his way given a seat to a girl from the street, whom he was now entertaining with genial courtesy. He had one leg thrown over the other, and one arm passed back along the top of the seat, and with the other he waved to the great buildings as they sprang up into life as the day grew. The girl beside him was smiling at his pleasantries, while the rising sun showed how tired and pale she was, and mocked at the paint around her sleepy eyes. The horse stumbled at every sixth step, and then woke again, while the whip rocked and rolled fantastically in its socket like a drunken man. From up the avenue of the Champs Élysées came the first of the heavy market-wagons, with the driver asleep on the bench, and his lantern burning dully in the early light. Back of him lay the deserted stretch of the avenue, strange and unfamiliar in its emptiness-save for the great arch that rose against the dawn, and seemed, from its elevation on the very top of the horizon, to serve as a gateway into the skies beyond. The air in the Champs Élysées was heavy with a perfume of flowers and of green plants, and the leaves dripped damp and cool with the dew. Hundreds of birds sang and chattered as though they knew the solitude was theirs but for only one more brief hour, and that they then must give way to the little children, and later to crowds of idle men and women. It seemed impossible that but a few hours before Duclerc had filled these silent, cool woods with her voice-Duclerc, with her shoulder-straps slipping to her elbows and her white powdered arms tossing in the colored lights of the serpentine dance. The long, gaudy lithographs on the bill-boards and the arches of colored lamps stood out of the silence and fresh beauty of the hour like the relics of some feast which should have been cleared away before the dawn, and the theatres themselves looked like temples to a heathen idol in some primeval wood. And as I passed out from under the cool trees to the silent avenues I felt as though I had caught Paris napping, and when she was off her guard, and good and fresh and sweet, and had discovered a hidden trait in her many-sided character, a moment of which she would be ashamed an hour or two later, as cynics are ashamed of their secret acts of charity.
II
THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS NIGHT
Table of Contents PARIS is the only city in the world which the visitor from the outside positively refuses to take seriously. He may have come to Paris with an earnest purpose to study art, or to investigate the intricacies of French law, or the historical changes of the city; or, if it be a woman, she may have come to choose a trousseau; but no matter how serious his purpose may be, there is always some one part of each day when the visitor rests from his labors and smiles indulgently and does as the Parisians do. Whether the city or the visitor is responsible for this, whether Paris adopts the visitor, or the visitor adapts himself to his surroundings, it is impossible to say. But there is certainly no other capital of the world in which the stranger so soon takes on the local color, in which he becomes so soon acclimated, and which brings to light in him so many new and unsuspected capacities for enjoyment and adventure.
Americans go to London for social triumph or to float railroad shares, to Rome for art's sake, and to Berlin to study music and to economize; but they go to Paris to enjoy themselves. And there are no young men of any nation who enter into the accomplishment of this so heartily and so completely as does the young American. It is hardly possible for the English youth to appreciate Paris perfectly, because he has been brought up to believe that "one Englishman can thrash three Frenchmen," and because he holds a nation that talks such an absurd language in some contempt; hence he is frequently while there irritable and rude, and jostles men at the public dances, and in other ways asserts his dignity.
But the American goes to Paris as though returning to his inheritance and to his own people. He approaches it with the friendly confidence of a child. Its language holds no terrors for him; and he feels himself fully equipped if he can ask for his "edition," and say, "Cocher, allez Henry's tout sweet." There is nothing so joyous and confiding as the American during his first visit to the French metropolis. He has been told by older men of the gay, glad days of the Second Empire, and by his college chum of the summer of the last exposition, and he enters Paris determined to see all that any one else has ever seen, and to outdo all that any one else has ever done, and to stir that city to its suburbs. He saves his time, his money, and his superfluous energy for this visit, and the most amusing part of it is that he always leaves Paris fully assured that he has enjoyed himself while there more thoroughly than any one else has ever done, and that the city will require two or three months' rest before it can readjust itself after the shock and wonder due to his meteoric flight through its limits. London he dismisses in a week as a place in which you can get good clothes at moderate prices, and which supports some very entertaining music-halls; but Paris, he tells you, ecstatically, when he meets you on the boulevards or at the banker's, where he is drawing grandly on his letter of credit, is "the greatest place on earth," and he adds, as evidence of the truth of this, that he has not slept in three weeks. He is...
