et of night, pleading and pathetic, that calls still to the
dreamers of all the world from out the tomb of faded triumphs and
forgotten memories?

True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory--gone that
Paris that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul.
True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd of
other days--Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them--is no
more. Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him of
the line of Francois Villon--now become a place for the vulgar oglings
of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gone
the wild loves, the bravuras, the _camaraderie_ of warm night skies in
the old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a strident
concatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer," with
its ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel," with its "grotto"
smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Neant,"
with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visiting
doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd
species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of
two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up
like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy _grimpants_ and
wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the
attendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song of
Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from the
heart of St. Germain. "Tea rooms," operated by American old maids, have
poked their noses into these once genuine boulevards ... and, as if
giving a further fillip to the scenery, clothing shops with windows
haughtily revealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, postcard shops laden
to the sill's edge with lithographs disclosing erstwhile _Saturday
Evening Post_ cover heroines, and case upon case displaying in lordly
enthusiasm the choicest cranial confections of the house of Stetson....

What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, has
not yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart in
the days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouder
people. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it,
lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highways
of the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then still
somewher