The Paris of this class is not the Paris that charms and holds you in
its spell. The fast, luxurious, and expensive Paris belongs to it;
the cosmopolitan Paris, kept going by the millions of the foreigners
who come here to amuse themselves. Theirs is the Rue de la Paix, the
Concours Hyppique, the Arménonville Restaurant, the Bois, the avenues
of the Champs Elysées and the Parc Monceau, the race-courses, the
Théâtre Français “Tuesdays,” the charity bazaars, the flower feasts and
exhibitions, the automobile competitions, the “five-o’clocks,” and M.
Brunetière’s lectures on Bossuet. This is the rowdy, reactionary Paris,
ever on view, which disapproves of the Pope, and would assuredly array
itself in garments of gaiety if M. Loubet were assassinated. This is
the Paris which sneers at _rasta-quouères_, and is ever on the lookout
for American heiresses for its needy titled sons, which is rabidly
anti-Semitic, and supports its prestige upon Jewish millions. Quite
recently, when anti-Semitism was raging in France, and we were informed
in every tone of fury and contempt that no self-respecting Catholic
could possibly regard a Jew as an honest man or a French subject, an
authentic French marquis married the daughter of a Hebrew millionaire,
and to console themselves for the obligation of profiting by their noble
comrade’s good fortune, his friends summed up the young lady’s qualities
in three amusing lines:—
“Belle comme Vénus,
Riche comme Crœsus,
Innocente comme Dreyfus.”
The raillery did not prevent “tout Paris” from being present at the
splendid marriage ceremony, and inscribing its best names upon the
wedding gifts. It could not do less, seeing that its king and master,
Philip of Orleans, the _digne_ (for alas! there is no English equivalent
of that indescribable French word as applied to a man) representative of
the House of France, is said to have accepted a million from the bride’s
anti-Semitic Hebrew mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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