Told by the Colonel

Excerpt: Four Americans were sitting in the smoking-room of a Paris hotel. One of them was a grizzled, middle-aged man, who sat silent and apart from the others and consumed his heavy black cigar with a somewhat gloomy air. The other three were briskly talking. They had been three days in Paris, and had visited the Moulin Rouge, the tomb of Napoleon, and the sewers, and naturally felt that they were thoroughly acquainted with the French capital, the French government, and the French people. They were unanimously of the opinion that Paris was in all things fifty years behind the age, and at least sixty behind Chicago. There was nothing fit to eat, drink, or smoke in Paris. The French railway carriages were wretched and afforded no facilities for burning travellers in case of an accident. The morals of French society?as studied at the Moulin Rouge?were utterly corrupt, owing possibly to that absence of free trade in wives and husbands which a liberal system of divorce permits. The French people did not understand English, which was alone sufficient to prove them unfit for self-government, and their preference for heavy five-franc pieces when they might have adopted soft and greasy dollar bills showed their incurable lack of cleanliness.