He is tantalized by the knowledge that all about him there are big doings, but, so far as he is concerned, he might just as well be attending a Sunday-school cantata.  Unless he be suitably introduced he will have never a chance to shake a foot with anybody or buy a drink for somebody in the inner circles of Viennese night life.  He is emphatically on the outside, denied even the poor satisfaction of looking in.  At that I have a suspicion, born of casual observation among other races, that the Viennese really has a better time when he is not trying than when he is trying.

Chapter XIII

Our Friend, the Assassin

No taste of the night life of Paris is regarded as complete without a visit to an Apache resort at the fag-end of it.  For orderly and law-abiding people the disorderly and lawbreaking people always have an immense fascination anyhow.  The average person, though inclined to blink at whatever prevalence of the criminal classes may exist in his own community, desires above all things to know at firsthand about the criminals of other communities.  In these matters charity begins at home.

Every New Yorker who journeys to the West wants to see a few roadagents; conversely the Westerner sojourning in New York pesters his New York friends to lead him to the haunts of the gangsters.  It makes no difference that in a Western town the prize hold-up man is more apt than not to be a real-estate dealer; that in New York the average run of citizens know no more of the gangs than they know of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—­which is to say, nothing at all.  Human nature comes to the surface just the same.

In Paris they order this thing differently; they exhibit the same spirit of enterprise that in a lesser degree characterized certain promoters of rubberneck tours who some years ago fitted up make-believe opium dens in New York’s Chinatown for the awed delectation of out-of-town spectators.  Knowing from experience that every other American who lands in Paris will crave to observe the Apache while the Apache is in the act of Apaching round, the canny Parisians have provided a line of up-to-date Apache dens within easy walking distance of Montmartre; and thither the guides lead the round-eyed tourist and there introduce him to well-drilled, carefully made-up Apaches and Apachesses engaged in their customary sports and pastimes for as long as he is willing to pay out money for the privilege.

Being forewarned of this I naturally desired to see the genuine article.  I took steps to achieve that end.  Suitably chaperoned by a trio of transplanted Americans who knew a good bit about the Paris underworld I rode over miles of bumpy cobblestones until, along about four o’clock in the morning, our taxicab turned into a dim back street opening off one of the big public markets and drew up in front of a grimy establishment rejoicing in the happy and we1l-chosen name of the Cave of the Innocents.