Borges retraces the path of tango, brought to Paris by upper-class Argentine families, and soon spreading across the Old Continent. It also reached London, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. Borges asserts that tango filled the places it landed with ecstasy. However, it seems to have betrayed itself. He writes: "It is strange that in Paris, the city that symbolizes perspicacious intelligence and a passion for pleasure, tango should become a modest art that loses its primitive steps and becomes a kind of sensual outing. The lyrics of the first tango songs lacked not only modesty but also logic." Borges objects to the loss of tango as his ancestors knew it. He deplores the fact that it has been legalized and reduced to mere calculated steps after having been the protégé of the netherworld, which by its very nature was free of any norms. Borges later objects to the classification of tango, when he emerges from his position, as "a sad, dancing idea, as if music were born at the level of the mind and not the emotions." At the end of his text, we read Borges: "Studying tango is not a sterile matter, because it means studying the vicissitudes of the Argentine soul," defending what he actually meant. This is what a man who, he says, hated tango writes, or so we think he claimed. Rula Rashed