He wants to see the nightlife of Paris and what he does see is a special performance by a number of bored but well-paid people of a drama that has run many thousands of nights and is entitled “Fooling the Tourist.” While he is buying champagne and listening to a jazz band, around the corner somewhere there is a little Bal Musette where the apaches, the people he thinks he is seeing, hang out with their girls, sit at long benches in the little smoky room, and dance to the music of a man with an accordion who keeps time with the stamping of his boots.
On gala nights, there is a drummer at the Bal Musette, but the accordion player wears a string of bells around his ankle and these, with the stamping of his boots as he sits swaying on a dais above the dancing floor, give the accent to the rhythm. The people that go to the Bal Musette do not need to have the artificial stimulant of the jazz band to force them to dance. They dance for the fun of it and they occasionally hold someone up for the fun of it, and because it is easy and exciting and pays well. Because they are young and tough and enjoy life, without respecting it, they sometimes hit too hard, or shoot too quick, and then life becomes a very grim matter with an upright machine that casts a thin shadow and is called a guillotine at the end of it.
Occasionally the tourist does come in contact with the real nightlife. Walking down the quiet hill along some lonely street in a champagne haze about two o’clock in the morning, he sees a pair of hard-faced kids come out of an alley. They are nothing like the sleek people he has just left. The two kids look around down the street to see if there is a policeman in sight and then close in on the night-walking tourist. Their closing in and a sudden dreadful jar are all that he remembers.
It is a chop back of the ear with a piece of lead pipe wrapped in [Le] Matin that does the trick and the tourist has at last made contact with the real nightlife he has spent so much money in seeking.
“Two hundred francs? The pig!” Jean says in the darkness of the basement lit by the match which Georges struck to look at the contents of the wallet.
“The Red Mill holds him up worse than we did, not so, my old?”
“But yes. And he would have a headache tomorrow morning anyway,” says Jean. “Come on back to the Bal.”
The Mecca of Fakers
The Toronto Daily Star
March 25, 1922
PARIS.—Paris is the Mecca of the bluffers and fakers in every line of endeavor from music to prizefighting. You find more famous American dancers who have never been heard of in America; more renowned Russian dancers who are disclaimed by the Russians; and more champion prizefighters who were preliminary boys before they crossed the ocean, per square yard in Paris than anywhere else in the world.
This state of affairs exists because of the extreme provinciality of the French people, and because of the gullibility of the French press. Everyone in Canada knows the names of half a dozen French soldiers and statesmen, but no one in France could give you the name of a Canadian general or statesman or tell you who was the present head of the Canadian government. By no one I mean none of the ordinary people; shop keepers, hotel owners and general bourgeois class. For example, my femme de ménage was horrified yesterday when I told her there was a Prohibition in Canada and the States. “Why have we never heard of it?” she asked. “Has it just been a law? What then does a man drink?”
An American girl was recently billed at the Paris music halls as “America’s best known and best loved dancer.” None of the recent arrivals in Paris from the States had ever heard of her, but Parisians flocked to see the American “Star.” Later it came out that she had a small part in a U.S. musical show some years ago.
Russians have inundated the city. They can get away with almost anything, because it is easy for a Russian to claim that he was anything he may want to say, in Russia; there is no way to check up on Russian reputations at present. So we have great Russian dancers, great Russian pianists, flutists, composers, and organists—all equally bad.
Jack Clifford, who styled himself the colored light-heavy-weight champion of the United States and Canada, was a recent nine-days’ wonder in France. He avoided meeting any fighters and demanded tremendous sums to box, but announced his willingness to meet Carpentier if a suitable purse was offered. No American had ever heard of him—but the Europeans swallowed him whole.
Clifford met his downfall in Vienna, where a third-rate Austrian pugilist, with an unpronounceable name, punished him so badly that the fight was halted in the third round to save the Negro from further punishment. Clifford had been on the floor most of the evening and did not show even an amateur’s knowledge of fighting. The crowd, which had paid several baskets of kronen apiece to see the American black champion, attempted to lynch Clifford with the ropes cut from the ring, but the Negro was saved by the police and left Vienna that night.
At present a familiar figure to those Torontonians who attend boxing matches is basking in the pleasant spotlight of European publicity. It is none other than Soldier Jones. Jones is being hailed by the Paris papers as “the heavyweight champion of Canada, the man who has never been knocked off his feet, the winner of eighty-five fights by knockouts and the best fighter that Canada has ever produced.”
Jones is at present in England, where he is being groomed for a fight with [Joe] Beckett, but his manager has sent press dope over to Paris, where it is being published by the English papers and avidly copied by the French.
Torontonians who recall what happened one night last year, when this same Soldier Jones abandoned caution so far as to enter the ring with Harry Greb, will be able to form their own opinions of how easy it is to become a “champion” abroad. The only rule seems to be that you must choose to be a champion of some very distant country and then stay away from that country. That is the way the fiddlers, fighters, painters and dancers are doing.
M. Deibler, A Much-Feared Man
The Toronto Daily Star
April 1, 1922
PARIS.—Monsieur Deibler is the most feared man in France. Deibler lives comfortably and respectively in a snug bourgeois suburb of Paris. He is a large, jovial-looking man and his neighbors know that he has some permanent position or other with the Ministry of Justice. They do not fear Deibler on the Avenue de Versailles, where he lives, because they do not know Deibler.
Every so often Deibler and three heavily built men go off on a mysterious trip. They are accompanied by a boxcar that carries the very grimmest load a French train has ever hauled. It is these trips that have earned Deibler his name of the most feared man in France, for in the boxcar is a guillotine.
Deibler is the permanent public executioner of France. He receives a fixed salary and fees for executions out of which he pays his three husky assistants. One of his assistants is his son-in-law, who, when business is light, runs a small café.
Deibler has two guillotines. One is a very large model, a replica of the grim framework that stood in the Place de la Concorde when the tumbrils jolted along the cobbled, narrow way of the Rue St. Honoré. The large guillotine is used for executions in Paris. The other guillotine is much smaller and is kept loaded in a special box ready to travel with Deibler and his three aides to any part of the provinces.
Under the French law a condemned prisoner is not told the time of his execution until an hour before it is to occur. Execution takes place at day-break. The condemned man is aroused, signs certain papers, is given a cigarette and a drink of rum, the barber is called in to shave the back of the prisoner’s neck and he is marched out to meet Monsieur Deibler. The guillotine is set up just outside the prison gate and troops keep any spectators a hundred yards away. It is the French law.
When it is all over, M. Deibler and his three muscular assistants take down the guillotine and go back to Paris, where the son-in-law totals up the receipts of his café and Monsieur Deibler returns to his family. The Avenue de Versailles is glad to see him back, he is a very jolly man, and his neighbors say: “Deibler’s back. He’s been away on another of his trips for the governme
nt. I wonder what this Deibler does, anyway?”
95,000 Wear the Legion of Honor
The Toronto Daily Star
April 1, 1922
PARIS.—Have you your cross of the Legion of Honor? If not, there is not much chance of getting it now for the boom days are past.
M. Raynaldy, of the French Chamber of Deputies, threw a handful of sand into the smooth-working distribution of decorations of the Legion of Honor when he placed some figures before a committee that was considering granting a number of honors on the occasion of the Molière tercentenary.
Since the armistice, M. Raynaldy’s figures show, 95,000 decorations of the Legion of Honor have been granted. 72,000 of these decorations were exclusively military and 23,000 were awarded to civilians for work during the war. You cannot walk twenty yards on the Grands Boulevards without seeing the familiar red ribbon of the Legion in someone’s buttonhole.
After seeing M. Raynaldy’s figures, the committee unanimously rejected the proposal to grant any new decorations on the occasion of the Molière festival.
Active French Anti-Alcohol League
The Toronto Daily Star
April 8, 1922
PARIS.—Models of ravaged brains and livers, dramatic colored charts, posters showing father brandishing a drink in one hand and a black bottle in the other, while he kicks the children about the house, hold a crowd open-mouthed all day before a great window frontage on the Boulevard St. Germain.
Thirst-driven Americans see the exhibit and shudder. They are afraid it presages the beginning of the end of what they regard as the golden age of European culture; the present blissful time when the French bartender has at last learned to mix a good martini and a palate-soothing bronx. For the big window on the boulevard houses the exhibit of the Ligue Nationale Contre Alcoolisme, a name that needs no translating.
The league is not a prohibition measure. It is, strictly, a league against alcoholism and is receiving the support of a large faction of the French people. Already it is making itself felt in France; its posters are in all railway stations and public places, and its greatest practical achievement has been the banishment of absinthe from France.
Its posters read something like this:
1—Do you know that liqueurs are one of the greatest causes of tuberculosis?
2—Do you know that apéritifs are deadly poisons?
3—Do you know that the use of picons often leads to insanity?
At the bottom of the poster, however, in small type, is the announcement that the league does not want people to drink only water; but no, there are the wines of France, yes, and the beers. It describes some and tells of their good effects so attractively that the reader usually leaves the poster in search of a café. The Frenchman still believes that water is only useful for washing and to flow under bridges.
Just across from the offices of the league is the Deux Magots, one of the most famous of the Latin Quarter cafés. Here at tables you see students sipping the liqueurs that cause tuberculosis, quaffing the apéritifs that are deadly poisons, and swigging the picons that often lead to insanity. But occasionally they cast an eye toward the crowd in front of the league window, and as they walk up the boulevard, they have a worried look at the models that show the horrible state of the human liver and lights under alcohol. The window has a sort of fascination for them.
An educational campaign takes years, but I believe that it is the beginning of the end and that alcohol, except for wine, beer and the cider of the north, is doomed in France. The reason I think so is because of the look on the students’ faces when they leave the league’s window, the fact that absinthe has already gone, and because the anti-alcohol forces are organized while the consumers are not. It is only a question of time.
Canada’s Recognition of Russia
The Toronto Daily Star
April 10, 1922
GENOA.—“Canada’s chief interest in the Genoa conference is the recognition of Russia,” said Sir Charles Gordon on his arrival in Genoa. “Canada has much harvest machinery for Russian export and wants recognition of Russia to open the market.”
Canada will act as a unit with the Empire delegation, Sir Charles said. This makes his statement extremely significant.
Tchitcherin Speaks at Genoa Conference
The Toronto Daily Star
April 10, 1922
GENOA.—Genoa is crowded, a modern Babel with a corps of perspiring interpreters trying to bring the representatives of forty different countries together. The narrow streets flow with crowds kept orderly by thousands of Italian troops. The journalists, however, today deserted Genoa to see the Soviet delegation at Rapallo, a hot eighteen-mile ride, to interview [George] Tchitcherin. Tchitcherin, blond and wearing new Berlin clothes with a large red rectangular badge, looks like a businessman. He talks with a slight purr because of missing teeth.
He saw the flood of reporters in batches, speaking to them in their own languages. Hundreds of photographers tried to get past guards who examined their cameras for bombs.
Tchitcherin said to me, “Regarding all matters of debts, we come with our hands free, without committing ourselves. The rights of foreign capital will be perfectly secured but Russia will resist all attempts by consortiums to make Russia a colony.”
Questioned about Soviet revolutionaries and moderate Socialists now on trial, Tchitcherin said: “The social revolutionaries are not being persecuted. They are being prosecuted for real offenses, such as the blowing up of banks, shooting at Lenin, blowing up ammunition dumps, and attempting to dynamite Trotsky’s train. We are changing our penitentiary system to educate and reform criminals.”
Questioned on the famine, Tchitcherin said: “Four years of blockade made the famine. The government is taxing all of Russia to aid the starving, and the transport system is working well.”
The eighty members of the Soviet delegation sat at a common table. The delegation is guarded by circles of soldiers, carabinieri and volunteer guards of Italian Communists. The telephone service is horrible and the Soviets are dissatisfied with their quarters so distant from Genoa.
Italian Premier
The Toronto Daily Star
April 10, 1922
GENOA.—“The spirit of the Washington arms conference must inspire this gathering,” Premier Facta said in his opening address. “The cloud that hung over the Pacific already has disappeared as a result of the limitation of arms conference,” the Italian statesman declared amid applause. “We at Genoa must now work for the peace of Europe in the same way.”
Tchitcherin Wants Japan Excluded
The Toronto Daily Star
April 11, 1922
GENOA.—The economic conference is proceeding amicably after the stormy scene at the opening session between Louis Barthou of France and Tchitcherin, head of the Russian Soviet delegation.
Tchitcherin caused another diversion today when he protested against the presence of Japan and Rumania. Count Ishii of the Japanese delegation retorted that Japan was here to stay, whether Tchitcherin liked it or not.
The commission appointed to consider the question of Russia consists of seven great powers and Switzerland, Sweden, Poland and Rumania. Ten delegates are to be elected to represent the balance of the states, including Canada.
Genoa Conference
The Toronto Daily Star
April 13, 1922
GENOA.—Italy realizes the danger of inviting the Soviet delegation to the Genoa Conference, and has brought fifteen hundred picked military policemen from other parts of Italy into Genoa to crush any Red or anti-Red disturbance as soon as it starts.
This is a farsighted move, for the Italian government remembers the hundreds of fatal clashes between the Fascisti and the Reds in the past two years, and is anxious that there should be as little civil war as possible while the conference is in progress.
They face a very real danger. Sections of Italy, principally Tuscany and in the north, have seen bloody fighting, murders, reprisals and
pitched battles in the last few months over communism. The Italian authorities accordingly fear the effect on the Reds of Genoa when they see the delegation of eighty representatives from Soviet Russia amicably received and treated with respect.
There is no doubt but that the Reds of Genoa—and they are about one-third of the population—when they see the Russian Reds, will be moved to tears, cheers, gesticulations, offers of wines, liqueurs, bad cigars, parades, vivas, proclamations to one another and the wide world and other kindred Italian symptoms of enthusiasm. There will also be kissings on both cheeks, gatherings in cafés, toasts to Lenin, shouts for Trotsky, attempts by three and four highly illuminated Reds to form a parade at intervals of two and three minutes, enormous quantities of chianti drunk and general shouts of “Death to the Fascisti!”
That is the way all Italian Red outbreaks start. Closing the cafés usually stops them. Uninspired by the vinous products of their native land, the Italian Communist cannot keep his enthusiasm up to the demonstration point for any length of time. The cafés close, the “Vivas” grow softer and less enthusiastic, the paraders put it off till another day and the Reds who reached the highest pitch of patriotism too soon roll under the tables of the cafés and sleep until the bartender opens up in the morning.
Some of the Reds going home in a gentle glow, chalk up on a wall in straggling letters, “VIVA LENIN! VIVA TROTSKY!” and the political crisis is over, unless of course they meet some Fascisti. If they happen to meet some Fascisti, things are very different again.
Dateline- Toronto Page 15