before the Cafe d'Harcourt,
making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "_Eh,
bebe_" assails their tympani with its suggested tintinnabulation of
needed francs: for him--"models." And the Bullier, ghost now of the old
Bullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred
palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its coloured
electricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue de
l'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril. And so, too, he finds it
atop the Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, a capon of its
former self, where Germaine and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle-axes
of the Rue Victor Masse, pose as modest little workgirls of the
Batignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, the
Cafe de Paris--and in the Moulin Rouge, which died forever from the
earth a dozen years ago when the architect Niermans seduced the place
with the "art nouveau"--and amid the squalid hussies of the fake
Tabarin--and in the Rue Royale, at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestra
composed of German gipsies and its toy balloons made by the Elite
Novelty Co. of Jersey City, U.S.A.

The American notion of Paris under the guardianship of the French
stars, of Paris caressed by the night wind come down from Longchamps and
filtered through the chestnut branches of Boulogne, is usually achieved
from the Sons of Moses who, in spats and sticks, adorn the entrance of
the Olympia and the sidewalks of the Cafe de la Paix and interrogatively
guide-sir the passing foreign mob. This Paris consists chiefly of a view
of the exotic bathtub of the good King Edward of Britain, quondam Prince
of Wales, in the celebrated house of the crystal staircase in the Rue
Chabanais, of one of the two "mysterious" midinette speak-easys in the
dark Rue de Berlin (where the midinettes range from the tender age of
forty-five to fifty), of the cellar of the tavern near the Pantheon with
its tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked floors--of tawdry resorts
and tawdrier peoples.

Do I treat of but a single class of Americans? Well, maybe so. But the
other class--and the class after that--think you _these_ are so
different? So different, goes my meaning, in the matter of appropriating
to themselves something of the deep and very true romance that sings
still in the shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia of capitals, that
sounds still, as sounds some far-off steamboat whistle wail in the
death-qui