That Spectacle, Believe
Me, Is Worth The Money Every Time.
There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter
love and revere more deeply than
They love a downy, squabbling
scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large,
broad negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront
full of yellow diamonds. To an American - and especially to an
American who was reared below Mason and Dixon's justly popular
Line - it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourthrater
from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart cafe,
entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and
female.
Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there
is another Paris besides this - a Paris of history, of art, of
architecture, of literature, of refinement; a Paris inhabited by
a people with a pride in their past, a pluck in their present, and
a faith in their future; a Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty,
pious plain people; a Paris of students and savants and scientists,
of great actors and great scientists and great dramatists. There
is one Paris that might well be burned to its unclean roots, and
another Paris that will be glorified in the minds of mankind forever.
And it would be as unfair to say that the Paris which comes flaunting
its tinsel of vice and pinchbeck villainy in the casual tourist's
face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior
of the United States to visit New York and, after interviewing one
Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway ticket
speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives
of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them
unfit.
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