On whether the open season for Mona Lisas has come or has passed.
Wandering your weary way past acres of the works of Rubens, and
miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of Michelangelos,
and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo
da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something
else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main
galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you
find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry
you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a
small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two
or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.
Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect
powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all
parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to
venture on the streets unaccompanied.
Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the
illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round
tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the
boulevards. All about you are French people, enjoying themselves
in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner. As for
yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read
your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of
street life. That emphatically is all you ask; merely that and a
little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are not.
Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk venders
cluster about you. And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar
inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados
who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They
hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes
envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and
self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for
you. Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience
of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you
toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap
forward and squabble under your feet for the prize. Then the
winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk
to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled
on his steel-pointed tool of trade.
In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel
and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and
begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the
first train leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy
consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature
can fathom the meaning of French timetables.
It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled
you - it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking
and planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the
realization that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and
the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no
mercy - that, as Walter Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is
what gets your goat - and gets it good!
So you shake the dust from your feet - your own dust, not Paris'
dust - and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train
from the station. And as the train draws away from the trainshed
you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and
reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital.
One of them says: English Spoken Here!
And the other says: Liberality! Economy! Frugality!
Chapter XVI
As Done in London
London is essentially a he-town, just as Paris is indubitably a
she-town. That untranslatable, unmistakable something which is
not to be defined in the plain terms of speech, yet which sets its
mark on any long-settled community, has branded them both - the one
as being masculine, the other as being feminine. For Paris the
lily stands, the conventionalized, feminized lily; but London is
a lion, a shag-headed, heavy-pawed British lion.
One thinks of Paris as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless
of morals and decidedly slovenly of person; craving admiration,
but too indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable; covering
up the dirt on a piquant face with rice powder; wearing paste
jewels in her earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the
fact that the ears themselves stand in need of soap and water.
London, viewed in retrospect, seems a great, clumsy, slow-moving
giant, with hair on his chest and soil under his nails; competent
in the larger affairs and careless about the smaller ones; amply
satisfied with himself and disdainful of the opinions of outsiders;
having all of a man's vices and a good share of his virtues; loving
sport for sport's sake and power for its own sake and despising
art for art's sake.
You do not have to spend a week or a month or a year in either
Paris or London to note these things. The distinction is wide
enough to be seen in a day; yes, or in an hour. It shows in all
the outer aspects. An overtowering majority of the smart shops
in Paris cater to women; a large majority of the smart shops in
London cater to men.
