1936 On the Continent

finally, the Empire, in the Ternes district, is a cross between circus and variety and generally has very good programmes.
    The Paris circuses will also attract those who like this sort of entertainment. There are two large circuses, the Cirque d’Hiver and the Cirque Medrano, where the Fratellini Brothers, clowns of real genius, have been scoring their triumphs for years.
    That completes the most important directions for “Paris After Dark.” For concerts, lectures, etc., it is best to consult the daily press or the
Semaine à Paris
. Generally speaking, club life is far less developed in Paris than in London.
    However, there is a very curious semi-public debating club which meets at various places and at irregular intervals. This is the Club du Faubourg, which organises debating evenings on all possible and impossible subjects, from thequestion of “Franco-German rapprochement” to the problem “Should wives be beaten or not?”
    However, you need not necessarily go to a theatre, cinema, cabaret or music-hall every evening in order to enjoy yourself in Paris. The most pleasant evenings are often the result of an improvised programme. But the right mood for such improvisation can only be adduced by a good dinner consumed in congenial surroundings. That produces the necessary inspiration, and on a fine spring or summer evening a stroll through a quarter you have not yet visited, or a bottle of wine consumed in the garden of the Mère Catherine on the enchanting Place de Tertre, with the glittering diadem of the city at your feet, is just the right thing, and better than a predetermined programme for the evening.

NIGHT LIFE OF PARIS
    It has become the fashion, wherever the subject of “Paris After Dark” is mentioned, whether in novels, travel descriptions or newspaper articles, to begin, figuratively, with a heavy sigh and say: “Ah, the real night life of Paris is a thing of the past! To-day everything is only stage-managed for the benefit of foreigners and the whole place is flooded with Americans!”
    Strangely enough, those who wail so much about the foreigners are foreigners themselves. There is nothing more contemptuous in the way of accents than that with which a foreigner in Paris refers to a foreigner as a foreigner.
    The Parisians themselves know very well that the real night life of any city exists for and by foreigners, that that is in the nature of things and could not be otherwise. Paris, in particular, is much frequented by foreigners, and it was just the same in our grandfather’s time, the time of the alleged “real” Paris.
    The changes which have undeniably occurred in the night life of Paris are not due to the naughty Americans and Mr. Cook’s charges—without them there would in fact be no night life at all, only general bankruptcy. The alterations in the general aspect of nocturnal life in Paris are a direct consequence of the great upheavals in the social structure of the city itself, which have come to pass since grandpa’s time. The romantic apaches and Bohemians were driven out not by the foreigners but by industrialisation and capitalism, in the economy of which there is simply no room for these romantic classes. The Bohemian artists have either starved to death, or risen to success by talent and grim industry, or merged with the parasitic class of the gigolos. The romantic and individualistic apache has given way to the brutally sinister gangster type. The war between the underworld and the world and the war of the underworld cliques among themselves, has become just as horribly modernised and industrialised as society as a whole. And the Parisienne, who lent fragrance and magic to the old Paris, has also passed through the same process.
The Parisienne of To-day
    The former type of Parisienne, about whom our grandfathers used to rave, who was glorified in novels and operas and who was the embodiment of Paris to the passionate youth of those days, the little seamstress, the
midinette
of Montmartre, the sweetheart of artists and students, is no more. What has happened to this enchanting creature? The answer is simple. With the general industrialisation she had to abandon her airy existence in the fourth estate; the seamstress became a factory worker, the sweet lower-middle class girl became a bitter proletarian. The whole Bohemian world, together with their sweethearts, who were not really poor (they had no money, but that is something different from being poor) were crushed