of a droll sincerity, “you see all the people here you really care to see, I mean, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or another—I mean, the trouble really is in getting a little time alone for yourself…. Or do you find it so?” the voices suavely, lightly, asked…. “Oh, look! look at that—there!” they cried with jubilant elation, “I mean, that boy and his girl there, walking along with their arms around each other!… Don’t you just a-do-o-re it?… Isn’t it too ma-a-rvellous?” those refined and silvery tones went on with patriotic tenderness. “I mean, there’s something so perfectly sweet and unselfconscious about it all!” the voices said with all the cultivated earnestness of Boston! “Now where?—where?—would you see anything like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.
(Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade—did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and sultry month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove—it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)
“… I mean—these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do…. They’re so much simpler about it…. I mean, so much more graceful with that kind of thing…. Il faut un peu de sentiment, n’est-ce pas?… Or do you think so?” said those light, those gay, those silvery, and half-English tones of cultivated Boston, which you, my brother, never yet have heard.
(I got you, lady. That was French. I know…. But if I felt your leg, if I began by fondling gracefully your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg, and said, “Chérie! Petite chérie!”—would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but brother, there are corn-haired girls named Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they’re still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish
