ral
Rigault de Genouilly, flanked by charging marines, who took Saigon for
France.

The most characteristic feature of Saigon is its cafe life. During the
heat of the day the Europeans keep within doors, but toward nightfall
they all come out and, gathering about the little tables which crowd
the sidewalks before the cafes in the Boulevard Bonnard and the Rue
Catinat, they gossip and sip their absinthes and smoke numberless
cigarettes and mop their florid faces and argue noisily and with much
gesticulation over the news in the _Courrier de Saigon_ or the
six-weeks-old _Figaro_ and _Le Temps_ which arrive fortnightly by the
mail-boat from France. They wear stiffly starched white linen--though
the jackets are all too often left unfastened at the neck--and enormous
mushroom-shaped topees which come down almost to their shoulders and
are many sizes too large for them, and they consume vast quantities of
drink, the evening usually ending in a series of violent altercations.
When the disputants take to backing up their arguments with blows from
canes and bottles, the cafe proprietor unceremoniously bundles them
into _pousse-pousses_, as rickshaws are called in Saigon, and sends
them home.

Along the Rue Catinat in the evenings saunters a picturesque and
colorful procession--haggard, slovenly officers of the _troupes
coloniales_ and of the Foreign Legion, the rows of parti-colored
ribbons on their breasts telling of service in little wars in the
world's forgotten corners; dreary, white-faced Government employees,
their cheeks gaunt from fever, their eyes bloodshot from heavy
drinking; sun-bronzed, swaggering, loud-voiced rubber planters in
riding breeches and double Terais, down from their plantations in the
far interior for a periodic spree; women gowned in the height of Paris
fashion, but with too pink cheeks and too red lips and too ready smiles
for strangers, equally at home on the Bund of Shanghai or the
boulevards of Paris; shaven-headed Hindu money-lenders from British
India, the lengths of cotton sheeting which form their only garments
revealing bodies as hairy and repulsive as those of apes; barefooted
Annamite tirailleurs in uniforms of faded khaki, their great round hats
of woven straw tipped with brass spikes like those on German helmets;
slender Chinese women, tripping by on tiny, thick-soled shoes in
pajama-like coats and trousers of clinging, sleazy silk; naked
_pousse-pousse_ coolies, streaming with sweat, g