I defy you to get more than that for twenty cents anywhere in the world!
Chapter XII
Night Life--with the Life Part Missing
In our consideration of this topic we come first to the night life of
the English. They have none.
Passing along to the next subject under the same heading, which is
the night life of Paris, we find here so much night life, of such
a delightfully transparent and counterfeit character; so much
made-to-measure deviltry; so many members of the Madcaps' Union engaged
on piece-work; so much delicious, hoydenish derring-do, all carefully
stage-managed and expertly timed for the benefit of North and South
American spenders, to the end that the deliriousness shall abate
automatically in exact proportion as the spenders quit spending--in
short, so much of what is typically Parisian that, really Paris, on its
merits, is entitled to a couple of chapters of its own.
All of which naturally brings us to the two remaining great cities of
Mid-Europe--Berlin and Vienna--and leads us to the inevitable conclusion
that the Europeans, in common with all other peoples on the earth, only
succeed--when they try to be desperately wicked--in being desperately
dull; whereas when they seek their pleasures in a natural manner they
present racial slants and angles that are very interesting to observe
and very pleasant to have a hand in.
Take the Germans now: No less astute a world traveler than Samuel
G. Blythe is sponsor for the assertion that the Berliners follow the
night-life route because the Kaiser found his capital did not attract
the tourist types to the extent he had hoped, and so decreed that
his faithful and devoted subjects, leaving their cozy hearths and
inglenooks, should go forth at the hour when graveyards yawn--and who
could blame them?--to spend the dragging time until dawn in being merry
and bright. So saying His Majesty went to bed, leaving them to work
while he slept.
After viewing the situation at first hand the present writer is of the
opinion that Mr. Blythe was quite right in his statements. Certainly
nothing is more soothing to the eye of the onlooker, nothing more
restful to his soul, than to behold a group of Germans enjoying
themselves in a normal manner. And absolutely nothing is quite so
ghastly sad as the sight of those same well-flushed, well-fleshed
Germans cavorting about between the hours of two and four-thirty A.M.,
trying, with all the pachydermic ponderosity of Barnum's Elephant
Quadrille, to be professionally gay and cutuppish. The Prussians must
love their Kaiser dearly. We sit up with our friends when they are dead;
they stay up for him until they are ready to die themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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