e American winter, hear again through
the bang of the steaming radiator and the crunch on the winter's snows
the song that Sauterne sang into your heart on the terrace named after
the lilacs--on that wonderful, star-born evening when all the world
seemed like a baby's first laugh; all full of dreams and hopes and
thrilling futures? And can you rub the white cold off the panes and look
out across the Atlantic to a warmer land and see again the Gardens of
the Tuileries sleeping in the moon glow and Sacre Coeur sentinelled
against the springtime sky and the tables of the cafes along the Grand
Boulevards agog and a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of the
Ambassadeurs tucked away in the trees and the al fresco amours at
Fouquet's and the gay crowds on the Avenue de l'Opera and the massive
splendour of Notre Dame blessing the night with its towered hands and
girls shooting ebony arrows from the bows of ebony eyes? And no smell of
Child's cooking filters into the open to offend the nostril, for the
sachet of the Bois de Boulogne breeze is again on the world. Ah, Bois de
Boulogne, silent now under the slumbering heavens, where your equal?
From the Prater to the Prado, from the Cassine to Central Park, one may
not find the like of you, fairy wood of France!

* * * * *

Romance hunter, come with me. Stomach-turned at the fat niggers dressed
up like Turks and Algerians and made to lend an "air" to the haunt of
the nocturnal belly dancers in the Rue Pigalle, sickened at the stupid
lewdities of the Rue Biot, disgusted at the brassy harlotries of the
Lapin Agil', come with me into that _auberge_ of the Avenue Trudaine
where are banned catch-coin stratagems, fleshly pyrotechnics, that
little refuge whose wall gives forth the tableau of Salis, he of the
Niagaran whiskers and the old Chat Noir, strangling the adolescent
versifiers of Montmartre, the tableau of the crimson rose of Poetry
blossoming from out their strangling pools of blood. Come with me and
sing a chorus with the crowd in the "conservatoire" of the Boulevard
Rochechouart and beat time, like the rest of it, with knife on plate,
with glass on table. Come away from the Brasserie des Sirenes of
Mademoiselle Marthe in the Faubourg Poissonniere, from the Rue Dancourt,
from the Moulin Rose in the Mazagran--from all such undiluted cellars of
vicious prostitution--if these be Paris, then West Twenty-eighth Street
in New York.

Look you, romance