--is a mighty gay
place at night. The sidewalks are crowded with the little tables of the
coffee and liqueur drinkers. The music of a hundred orchestras bursts
forth from the lighted windows. The air is soft with the fragrance of a
June evening, tempered by the curling smoke of fifty thousand cigars.
Through the noise and chatter of the crowd there sounds unending the
wail of the motor horn.

The hours of Parisian gaiety are late. Ordinary dinner is eaten at about
seven o'clock, but fashionable dinners begin at eight or eight thirty.
Theatres open at a quarter to nine and really begin at nine o'clock.
Special features and acts,--famous singers and vaudeville artists--are
brought on at eleven o'clock so that dinner-party people may arrive in
time to see them. The theatres come out at midnight. After that there
are the night suppers which flourish till two or half past. But if you
wish, you can go between the theater and supper to some such side-long
place as the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin, which reach the height of
their supposed merriment at about one in the morning.

At about two or two thirty the motors come whirling home, squawking
louder than ever, with a speed limit of fifty miles an hour. Only the
best of them can run faster than that. Quiet, conservative people in
Paris like to get to bed at three o'clock; after all, what is the use of
keeping late hours and ruining one's health and complexion? If you make
it a strict rule to be in bed by three, you feel all the better for it
in the long run--health better, nerves steadier, eyes clearer--and
you're able to get up early--at half-past eleven--and feel fine.

Those who won't or don't go to bed at three wander about the town, eat a
second supper in an all-night restaurant, circulate round with guides,
and visit the slums of the Market, where gaunt-eyed wretches sleep in
crowded alleys in the mephitic air of a summer night, and where the idle
rich may feed their luxurious curiosity on the sufferings of the idle
poor.

The dinners, the theaters, the boulevards, and the rest of it are all
fun enough, at any rate for one visit in a lifetime. The "real wicked"
part of it is practically fake--served up for the curious foreigner with
money to throw away. The Moulin Rouge whirls the wide sails of its huge
sign, crimson with electric bulbs, amid the false glaze of the Place
Blanche. Inside of it there is more red--the full red of bad claret and
the bright red of cong