Paris Waits



It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris
without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy
emptiness.

The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the
boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that
sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to
the average American through Sunday supplements and the
reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead.
Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris
departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the
passing extravaganza of relief, from dull lives elsewhere. The
Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog
safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the
curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving
Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their
morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in
bloom and madame was arranging her early editions on the table of
her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.

Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What
has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-Second
Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of
furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers.
Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live