Their
favorite tipple appeared to be beer; and their female companions
snuggled closely beside them.
We stayed among them fully twenty minutes, but not a single person
was stabbed while we were there. It must have been an off-night
for stabbings.
Still, I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here,
for the first, last and only time in Paris, I found a shop where
a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with
vociferous enthusiasm. The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled
on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner.
The waiter, though, bowed before us--a shockheaded personage in
the ruins of a dress suit--at the same time saying words which I
took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that
he had called us something that might be freely translated as a
certain kind of female lobster. Circumscribed by our own inflexible
and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with
calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes
further than that--he calls you a female lobster, which seems
somehow or other to make it more binding.
However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately
offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which
for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside
the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that
all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World
was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was,
for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself
down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has
liver for breakfast every morning.
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