Once, a good many years ago—­in the century before the last I think it was—­a member of the Teutonic racial stock was accidentally caught out in the fresh air and some of it got into his lungs.  And, being a strange and a foreign influence to which the lungs were unused, it sickened him; in fact I am not sure but that it killed him on the spot.  So the emperors of Germany and Austria got together and issued a joint ukase on the subject and, so far as the traveling public was concerned, forever abolished those dangerous experiments.  Over there they think a draft is deadly, and I presume it is if you have never tampered with one.  They have a saying:  A little window is a dangerous thing.

As with fresh air on the Continent, so also with baths—­except perhaps more so.  In deference to the strange and unaccountable desires of their English-speaking guests the larger hotels in Paris are abundantly equipped with bathrooms now, but the Parisian boulevardiers continue to look with darkling suspicion on a party who will deliberately immerse his person in cold water; their beings seem to recoil in horror from the bare prospect of such a thing.  It is plainly to be seen they think his intelligence has been attainted by cold water externally applied; they fear that through a complete undermining of his reason he may next be committing these acts of violence on innocent bystanders rather than on himself, as in the present distressing stages of his mania.  Especially, I would say, is this the attitude of the habitue of Montmartre.

I can offer no visual proof to back my word; but by other testimony I venture the assertion that when a boulevardier feels the need of a bath he hangs a musk bag round his neck—­and then, as the saying is, the warmer the sweeter.  His companion of the gentler sex apparently has the same idea of performing daily ablutions that a tabby cat has.  You recall the tabby-cat system, do you not?—­two swipes over the brow with the moistened paw, one forward swipe over each ear, a kind of circular rubbing effect across the face—­and call it a day!  Drowning must be the most frightful death that a Parisian sidewalk favorite can die.  It is not so much the death itself—­it is the attendant circumstances.

Across the river, in the older quarters of Paris, there is excitement when anybody on the block takes a bath—­not so much excitement as for a fire, perhaps, but more than for a funeral.  On the eve of the fatal day the news spreads through the district that to-morrow poor Jacques is going to take a bath!  A further reprieve has been denied him.  He cannot put it off for another month, or even for another two weeks.  His doom is nigh at hand; there is no hope—­none!

Kindly old Angeline, the midwife, shakes her head sadly as she goes about her simple duties.

On the morrow the condemned man rises early and sees his spiritual adviser.  He eats a hearty breakfast, takes an affectionate leave of his family and says he is prepared for the worst.  At the appointed hour the tumbrel enters the street, driven by the paid executioner—­a descendant of the original Sanson—­and bearing the dread instrument of punishment, a large oblong tin tub.