The assistant manager, a fluent Frenchman from Romania via Algiers, looked them up and down with that contempt, that incomparable and enfeebling contempt, which assistant managers reserve for foreigners on their first day in Paris.
“We are quite full up,” he sniffed.
“You haven’t anything else at all?” she protested.
“No, Madame.”
Those were the words, but the tune was, “No, you foreign nuisance—jolly lucky you are to be admitted here at all—I wonder if you two really are married—well, I’ll overlook that, but I shan’t stand any Yankee impertinence!”
Even the airy Fran was intimidated, and she said only, “Well, I don’t like it—”
And then Samuel Dodsworth appeared again.
His knowledge of Parisian hotels and their assistant managers was limited, but his knowledge of impertinent employees was vast.
“Nope,” he said. “No good. We don’t like it. We’ll look elsewhere.”
“But Monsieur has engaged this suite!”
The internationalist and the provincial looked at each other furiously, and it was the assistant manager whose eyes fell, who looked embarrassed, as Sam’s paws curled, as the back of his neck prickled with unholy wrath.
“Look here! You know this is a rotten hole! Do you want to send for the manager—the boss, whatever you call him?”
The assistant manager shrugged, and left them, coldly and with speed.
Rather silently, Sam lumbered beside Fran down to their taxi. He supervised the reloading of their baggage, and atrociously overtipped everyone whom he could coax out of the hotel.
“Grand Universel!” he snapped at the taxi-driver, and the man seemed to understand his French.
In the taxi he grumbled, “I told you I had to learn the French for ‘Go to hell.’ ”
A silence; then he ruminated, “Glad we got out of there. But I bullied that poor rat of a clerk. Dirty trick! I’m sorry! I’m three times as big as he is. Stealing candy from a kid! Dirty trick! I see why they get sore at Americans like me. Sorry, Fran.”
“I adore you!” she said, and he looked mildly astonished.
At the Grand Universel, on the Rue de Rivoli, they found an agreeable suite overlooking the Tuileries, and twenty times an hour, as she unpacked, Fran skipped to the window to gloat over Paris, the Casanova among cities.
Their sitting-room seemed to him very pert and feminine in its paneled walls covered with silky yellow brocade, its fragile chairs upholstered in stripes of silver and lemon. Even the ponderous boule cabinet was frivolous, and the fireplace was of lively and rather indecorous pink marble. He felt that it was a light-minded room, a room for sinning in evening clothes. All Paris was like that, he decided.
Then he stepped out on the fretted iron balcony and looked to the right, to the Place de la Concorde and the beginning of the Champs Élysées, with the Chamber of Deputies across the Seine. He was suddenly stilled, and he perceived another Paris, stately, aloof, gray with history, eternally quiet at heart for all its superficial clamor.
Beneath the quacking of motor horns he heard the sullen tumbrils. He heard the trumpets of the Napoleon who had saved Europe from petty princes. He heard, without quite knowing that he heard them, the cannon of the Emperor who was a Revolutionist. He heard things that Samuel Dodsworth did not know he had heard or ever could hear.
“Gee, Fran, this town has been here a long time, I guess,” he meditated. “This town knows a lot,” said Samuel Dodsworth of Zenith. “Yes, it knows a lot.”
And, a little sadly, “I wish I did!”
There are many Parises, with as little relation one to another as Lyons to Monte Carlo, as Back Bay to the Dakota wheatfields. There is the trippers’ Paris: a dozen hotels, a dozen bars and restaurants, more American than French; three smutty revues; three railroad stations; the Café de la Paix; the Eiffel Tower; the Arc de Triomphe; the Louvre; shops for frocks, perfumes, snake-skin shoes, and silk pajamas; the regrettable manners of Parisian taxi-drivers; and the Montmartre dance-halls where fat, pink-skulled American lingerie-buyers get drunk on imitation but inordinately expensive champagne, to the end that they put on pointed paper hats, scatter confetti, conceive themselves as Great Lovers, and in general forget their unfortunate lot.
The students’ Paris, round about the Sorbonne, very spectacled and steady. The fake artists’ Paris, very literary and drunk and full of theories. The real artists’ Paris, hidden and busy and silent. The cosmopolites’ Paris, given to breakfast in the Bois, to tea at the Ritz, and to reading the social columns announcing who has been seen dining with princesses at Ciro’s—namely, a Paris whose chief joy is in being superior to the trippers.
There is also reported to be a Paris inhabited by no one save three million Frenchmen.
It is said that in this unknown Paris live bookkeepers and electricians and undertakers and journalists and grandfathers and grocers and dogs and other beings as unromantic as people Back Home.
Making up a vast part of all save this last of the Parises are the Americans.
Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities. It is a joyous town, and its chief joy is in its jealousies. Every citizen is in rivalry with all the others in his knowledge of French, of museums, of wine, and of restaurants.
The various castes, each looking down its nose at the caste below, are after this order: Americans really domiciled in Paris for years, and connected by marriage with the French noblesse. Americans long domiciled, but unconnected with the noblesse. Americans who have spent a year in Paris—those who have spent three months—two weeks—three days—half a day—just arrived. The American who has spent three days is as derisive toward the half-a-day tripper as the American resident with smart French relatives is toward the poor devil who has lived in Paris for years but who is there merely for business.
And without exception they talk of the Rate of Exchange.
And they are all very alike, and mostly homesick.
They insist that they cannot live in America,
