press me less favourably than the scribbled
inscriptions on notes of assignation placed covertly by subsidised
waiters into the serviettes of the Callot-adorned Thaises in the
spectacularized haunts of the Bois. The piano in Le Caveau may be
diabetic, senescent, and its operator half blind and all knuckles (as he
is), but the music it gives forth is full of the romance of Sheppard and
Turpin, of stage coach days and dark and nervous highways, of life when
life was in the world and all the world was young.

Paris when your skies are greying, how many of us know you? Do we know
your Rue du Pont Neuf, with its silent melodrama under the dawning
heavens, or do we know only the farce of your Montmartre? Do we know the
drama of your Comptoir, of your Rue Montorgueil, when your skies are
faintly lighting, or do we know only the burlesque of your Maxim's and
your Catelans? Do we, when the week's work of your humbler people is
done, see the laughter in dancing eyes in the Rue Mouffetard or, in the
revel of your Saturday night, do we see only the belladonna'd leer of
the drabs in the Place Pigalle? Do we hear the romance of your
concertinas setting thousands of hobnailed boots a-clatter with
Terpsichore in the Boulevard de la Chapelle, in Polonceau and Myrrha, or
do we hear only your union orchestra soughing through Mascagni in the
Cafe de Paris? Do we know the romance of your peoples or the romance of
your restaurateurs? Which? I wonder.

* * * * *

Paris has changed ... it isn't the Paris of other days ... and
Paquerette, little Easter daisy in whose lips new worlds were born to
you, little flower of France the music and perfume of whose youth are
yours still to remember through the guerrilla warfare of the mounting
years--little Paquerette is dead. And you are old now and married, and
there are the children to look out for--they're at the school age--and
life's quondam melody is full of rests and skies are not always as blue
as once they were. And Paris, four thousand miles beyond the seas--Paris
isn't what it used to be!

[Illustration: PARIS]

But Paris is. For Paris is not a city--it is Youth. And Youth never
dies. To Youth, while youth is in the arteries, Paris is ever Paris,
a-throb with dreams, a-dream with love, a-love with triumphs to be
triumphed o'er. The Paris of Villon and Murger and Du Maurier is still
there by the Seine: it is only Villon and Murger and Du Maurier who are
not.