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