Under Cover

Paris wears her greenest livery and puts on her most gracious airs in early summer. When the National Fete commemorative of the Bastille’s fall has gone, there are few Parisians of wealth or leisure who remain in their city. Trouville, Deauville, Etretat and other pleasure cities claim them and even the bourgeoisie hie them to their summer villas.

The city is given up to those tourists from America and England whom Paris still persists in calling Les Cooks in memory of that enterprising blazer of cheap trails for the masses. Your true Parisian and the stranger who has stayed within the city’s gates to know her well, find themselves wholly out of sympathy with the eager crowds who follow beaten tracks and absorb topographical knowledge from guide-books.

Monty Vaughan was an American who knew his Paris in all months but those two which are sacred to foreign travelers, and it irritated him one blazing afternoon in late July to be persistently mistaken for a tourist and offered silly useless toys and plans of the Louvre. The camelots, those shrewd itinerant merchants of the Boulevards, pestered him continually. These excellent judges of human nature saw in him one who lacked the necessary harshness to drive them away and made capital of his good nature.

He was a slim, pleasant-looking man of five and twenty, to whom the good things of this world had been vouchsafed, with no effort on his part to obtain them; and in spite of this he preserved a certain frank and boyish charm which had made him popular all his life.

Presently on his somewhat aimless wanderings he came down the Avenue de l’Opéra and took a seat under the awning and ordered an innocuous drink. He was in a city where he had innumerable friends, but they had all left for the seashore and this loneliness was unpleasant to his friendly spirit. But even in the Café de Paris he was not to be left alone and he was regarded as fair game by alert hawkers. One would steal up to his table and deposit a little measure of olives and plead for two sous in exchange. Another would place some nuts by his side and demand a like amount. And when they had been driven forth and he had lighted a cigarette, he observed watching him with professional eagerness a ramasseur de megot, one of those men who make a livelihood of picking up the butts of cigars and cigarettes and selling them.

When Monty flung down the half-smoked cigarette in hope that the man would go away he was annoyed to find that the fellow was congratulating himself that here was a tourist worth following, who smoked not the wispy attenuated cigarettes of the native but one worth harvesting. He probed for it with his long stick under the table and stood waiting for another.

The heat, the absence of his friends and the knowledge that he must presently dine alone had brought the usually placid Monty into a wholly foreign frame of mind and he rose abruptly and stalked down the Avenue.

A depressed-looking sandwich-man, bearing a device which read, “One can laugh uproariously at the Champs Elysées every night during the summer months,” blocked his way, and permitted a woman selling fans of the kind known to the camelots as les petits vents du nord to thrust one upon him. “Monsieur does not comprehend our heat in Paris,” she said. “Buy a little north wind. Two sous for a little north wind.”

Monty thrust a franc in her hand and turned quickly from her to carom against a tall well-dressed man who was passing. As Monty began to utter his apology the look of gloom dropped from his face and he seized the stranger’s hand and shook it heartily.