Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/60

 in London is the frowsy female, with horrid bonnet or atrocious hat and feathers askew, hateful alcoholic visage, and sordid frippery all in tatters. Need one follow the squalid and ghastly vision to its lair to guess the conditions of its dwelling, the habits of its home? There are many blessings France might fittingly borrow of England and be the better for them, but we cannot deny that England, the mightiest empire of the world, would be improved by imitation of French exterior decency. It would brush from English public life many a brazen horror. The love-making of the masses would then be relegated to the privacy of four walls, and we would not see at every turn of our path Harry and his girl with their arms round each other's waist, or giggling girls in omnibuses sitting on soldiers' knees, or sights far worse than these, that scare the virtuous and make foreigners stare.

It is a settled thing that Paris is the home of vice. French novels of the day attest this fact; so do the lyrics of the halls of pleasure, where that decadent songstress, Yvette Guilbert (admired of decadent London), offers the strangest entertainment that ever delighted mankind in search of distraction; so, above all, do the songs of the unpublished poets of Montmartre, who fondly and seriously take themselves for misprized genius in the lump, and pose as so many Verlaines. Yet nothing in Paris offends the eye of