It is springtime in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. Can you, now remote in the 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 Sacré Coeur sentinelled against the springtime sky and the tables of the cafés 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'Opéra 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 Sirènes of Mademoiselle Marthe in the Faubourg Poissonnière, 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.