There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter love and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large, broad negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront full of yellow diamonds.  To an American—­and especially to an American who was reared below Mason and Dixon’s justly popular Line—­it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourthrater from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart cafe, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and female.

Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there is another Paris besides this—­a Paris of history, of art, of architecture, of literature, of refinement; a Paris inhabited by a people with a pride in their past, a pluck in their present, and a faith in their future; a Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty, pious plain people; a Paris of students and savants and scientists, of great actors and great scientists and great dramatists.  There is one Paris that might well be burned to its unclean roots, and another Paris that will be glorified in the minds of mankind forever.  And it would be as unfair to say that the Paris which comes flaunting its tinsel of vice and pinchbeck villainy in the casual tourist’s face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior of the United States to visit New York and, after interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway ticket speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them unfit.  Yes, it would be even more unfair.  For the alleged gay life of New York touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New Yorkers, whereas in Paris there are numbers of sane and decent folks who seem to know nothing except by hearsay of what goes on after dark in the Montmartre district.  Besides, no man in the course of a short and crowded stay may hope to get under the skin of any community, great or small.  He merely skims its surface cuticle; he sees no deeper than the pores and the hair-roots.  The arteries, the frame, the real tissue-structure remain hidden to him.  Therefore the pity seems all the greater that, to the world at large, the bad Paris should mean all Paris.  It is that other and more wholesome Paris which one sees—­a light-hearted, good-natured, polite and courteous Paris—­when one, biding his time and choosing the proper hour and proper place, goes abroad to seek it out.