HER BOOK

PARIS
BY DEEMS TAYLOR

THERE is a disease called *Lutetiaphilia*; and thousands of us have it. During the winter months, its presence is scarcely to be detected, except in a few isolated and violent cases. The average victim goes about his business and mingles with his friends, to all appearances a normal, resigned and convinced American citizen. But a day comes — generally about mid-March, along the North Atlantic coast — when the grip of winter relaxes just enough to give rise to the rumour that spring may be just possibly not far behind? and then it is all over with us. We begin to babble of horse-chestnut blossoms, and the jonquils in the *Tuileries*, and the ducks in the *Parc Monceau*. Wistfully and with glazed eyes we speak of the bookstalls on the *quais* and the arches of the *Pont-Neuf*. Show us a picture of the Medici Fountain, and we burst into tears.

All about us are people preparing to sun themselves on the Riviera, and watch bullfights in Madrid, and climb Alps, and see

Shakespeare's birthplace. Little we care. "Europe" means just one place to us: Paris. Thither we want to go, and thither gone there, barring an act of God, shall we sit. If you do succeed in luring us elsewhere — to Florence, Rome, Vienna, Munich — we dutifully gaze, explore, admire, and even praise. But we are thinking all the time of Paris, to which, under no matter what pretext, we shall forthwith return.

Mine is an aggravated case, but hardly, I have reason to believe, a unique one. Americans are not the only victims. Englishmen, Scandinavians, Germans, and Austrians have *Lutetiaphilia*, and have it badly. Laurence Stern had it; Heinrich Heine had it; so did George du Maurier and Paul Bartlett and John Singer Sargent. Why should it be so? Why is it that so many men and women, particularly those of Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon extraction, are obsessed by this nostalgia for an alien metropolis, a city with whose history and traditions they have no

racial bond, a city whose inhabitants do not invite their presence and who think of them, if at all, as barbarian, if endurable, paying guests? What about this Paris?

Alors, there is this about it — or rather, these. For the reasons for our behaviour are numerous and fairly complicated. Inevitably, I can answer for only one of us, hoping that an explanation of his symptoms will prove to be more than a purely personal and private diagnosis. First of all, then, I like to be in Paris because it is full of French people. One has to be a veteran New Yorker, I suspect, in order to appreciate fully what it means to the mind and the nerves to be in a city whose population is reasonably homogeneous. In my home town, existence is, ethnologically speaking, one continuous diurnal tour of the world. My butcher is a German, my newsdealer is a Russian, and my grocer is an Italian. My landlord, oddly enough, is of Anglo-Saxon descent. The cook is alternately Ethiopian and Scandinavian —

depending upon what week it is—the maid is at present Spanish with a touch of Moorish, and the nurse was French-Swiss yesterday and is going to be Danish tomorrow; my *marchand de vins* is of indeterminate stock and is—legally, at least—a member of the criminal classes, and my milkman and baker are limited liability corporations. All these people not only speak English with differing inflections, pronunciations, and intentions, but also differ profoundly in their manners of thought and feeling. I must approach every one of them from a different mental direction, and must expect to find him equipped with a set of vices and virtues that have nothing in common with those of his fellows.

In Paris, I am under no such obligations. If, as I emerge from the *Gare Saint-Lazare*, I can hail a taxi, get my luggage aboard, bid farewell to the porter, and, arriving at my hotel, part from the driver with mutual expressions of goodwill—if I can do these things satisfactorily and without mental

anguish, I can cope amicably with all of Paris. For the porter and the taxi-driver are French, and so is *Madame* behind the hotel desk, and so is Louis, the bearded chambermaid, and so are the clerks in the shops, and the waiters in the cafés and restaurants, and the newsdealers, and the traffic cops, and the President of the Republic. They are all of one race. They may not think the same things, but they arrive at their conclusions by the same mental processes, and they feel alike. In my dealings with them, there are certain definite things I may confide, and certain others that I must keep to myself, certain things I should expect of them, and certain others that I must never expect, certain ways in which I can trust them and certain ways in which I can not. And they are always the same things, and the same ways. Once having learned them, I am free to be at least a gallicized version of myself, instead of a distracted mental chameleon trying to blend with a dozen racial colour schemes. The

only other people that I see in Paris
are my American friends. And that, too,
is pleasant; because I never see them at
home.

Another thing that endears Paris to me
is the certain knowledge that when I arrive,
Paris will be there. This is a very, very
comforting thought for a New Yorker. It
gives me a sorely-needed sense of perman-
ence and safety to reflect that when next
I visit Paris I need not fear to find that the
*Café des Deux Magots* has been replaced by a
motion picture palace, or that *Notre-Dame*
has been sand-blasted and fitted with an
indirect lighting system, or that the *Hôtel
de Sens* has disappeared to make way for a
seventeen-story cooperative apartment. I read
somewhere recently that plans were afoot
to build a group of skyscrapers on the *Ile
Saint-Louis*. I am ordinarily a cautious gambl-
er, but I am willing to wager odds 418 to
1 that skyscrapers will be built on the *Ile
Saint-Louis* just as soon as the American

Chamber of Commerce has purchased Paris,
and not until then.

It is customary, among pre-war *Lutetia-philes*, to lament the passing of the old days. The *Champs-Elysées*, it seems, has gone the way of Fifth Avenue and surrendered to shops, and the *Café d'Harcourt* no longer serves dinner, and the crowd on the boulevards isn't what it was, and the Quarter has deteriorated, and a *franc* won't buy what it would in 1906. These, to one whose native city is taken to pieces and reassembled every five years, seem minor calamities. The American tradition is naturally one of trial and error. Our civilization began about seven thousand years later than Europe's, and small wonder that we are still experimenting with it. Just the same, it is good for an American to realize, periodically, that there does eventually come a time when the architects of civilization can step back, draw a long breath, and say, "There; I guess that will do."

I get from Paris something no American
can possibly get from his own country:
a contact with life remote as well as with
life contiguous. The Thermes in the court-
yard of the *Hôtel de Cluny*, where Roman
gentlemen took vapour baths long before
there was a France; *Notre-Dame*, still un-
finished after eight centuries, on whose
towers carpenters built scaffolding and
masons chipped and sweated two hundred
and fifty years before my own country was
even suspected; the iron rings in the house
walls of the *Rue Brisemiche*, through which,
sixteen generations ago, ran the chains that
made the street a nightly death-trap for fleec-
ing gangsters—these things are more than
carefully preserved antiquities with which
to astonish the tourist. They are a reminder
and a promise. “Life is continuous,” they
say. “Men have been here for a long time;
and they, too, laboured and quarrelled, and
took their ease, and strove for beauty. And
there will be others like you, long after you

are gone. Don't take life so hard. You did
not create it, and you will not have to
complete it." These are very un-American
truths; and they are very reassuring to hear.

They embody the one great basic truth
that the Parisian has learned, and that he
has to teach; that at birth all men are equal
only in that they are under a common
sentence of death, and that it is therefore
unwise to postpone life any longer than is
absolutely necessary. Every time I go to Paris
I realize how little we Americans know about
living. The Parisian, it is notorious, does not
exactly disdain money; but he will not sell
his life for it. Deep in the heart of the average
American lies the ambition to be head of
the firm, or America's Sweetheart, or Grand
Exalted Ruler of the Order of Unicorns, or
chairman of the house committee. The Paris-
ian's dream is less complicated: some day
to quit work. I do not say that it is a universally
wise dream, or even a worthy one; but it
certainly makes for a good life.

The Parisian's working hours are, he figures, as much a part of his life (the only one, after all, that he has) as his leisure ones. So he does not lunch hastily in the office on an apple and a glass of milk. He closes up shop and goes to his favourite restaurant and stays two hours — this, whether he be a bank president or a taxi driver. If he keeps a dog or a cat, he frequently takes it with him when he goes to work. He works hard, even by our standards; but when he loafs, he does so without reservations. His pleasures are inexpensive — he sips his drinks, to make them last longer, and prefers sitting on the grass in the *Bois de Boulogne* to scuttling through it in a Ford — but deliberately so. For some day, if he saves very carefully, he will be able to retire and do nothing at all at the age when the average American is just entering upon his third nervous breakdown.

For the first few days after I arrive in Paris I find myself outstripping most of the pedestrians, so ingrained is the American habit of

putting on full steam ahead in order to go nowhere in particular. But gradually I find the pace slackening. Within a week I have succumbed to the rhythm of the city. I stop trying to save five minutes on one errand in order to spend it on another. I stop staying up late at night in order not to miss something. I can sit two hours on the terrasse of the Café Cardinal, sipping an infantile concoction of vermouth, raspberry syrup, and water, and find the experience more exciting than a New York night club. I have begun again to live.

But all these things, you might object, are not peculiar to Paris. Most of them are true of all of France, some of them of all Europe. True. But Paris has one more quality to add, one that is wholly its own. It is the loveliest thing that man ever built. Here is proof that when men have a common dream, they can make it come true. For generations, Frenchmen have been thinking, «Here shall be a city that, as nearly as we can make it so, shall be wholly beautiful.» And they have done it.

Paris is probably the only real improvement upon Nature that man has ever achieved. Everything about it is right. The boulevards and avenues are just the right width, the buildings are just the right size (there is no structure in Paris that has not in front of it an open space at least equal to its own height), the river is placed just right, and is just wide enough, the colours and forms and sounds and smells are right. Every street in Paris has something at the end of it; it may be a statue or a monumental building, or only a tree. But it is there to look at; and facing it, be it a mile away, is something to balance it. Paris is the only thoroughly comfortable city in the world, the only one that has enough trees and flowers and places to sit down.

I think you will find that most of us people who love Paris so are thoroughly eye-minded. The world we look at is the important one, and our souls are at peace only when our eyes are at rest. We weary of having to see ginger-ale advertisements flanking our public

libraries; we get no more fun out of twisting our necks to see a skyscraper than we would out of lying on the floor to see a friend.

I think of Paris, and I think, not of people or *couturiers*, or *boîtes de nuit*, or the *Folies-Bergère*; but of pale cream stucco or old stone, contorted black chimney-pots on grey slate roofs against a dove-blue sky, the shadows of leaves on a sun-swept white street. Up in the attic of the mind is a trunk marked *La Ville Lumière*, and it is packed to the brim with scraps and remnants of images — the *Arc de l'Etoile* from the *Tuileries*, pure violet through two miles of Paris air... the regiments of trees in the *Bois*, all the same size and all shrouded in the same green veil of moss that only French soil seems to produce... the toy boats in the pond of the *Luxembourg*... the five trees that bend discreetly beside the water's edge just below the *Pont Royal*... the curving smoke from a busy, practical little boat—going out adventurously to *Saint-Cloud*, but sure to return... as all things do.

The sun sets, and turns the dome of the Sacré-Cœur into a pink soapbubble. The light fades, and the shop windows begin to glow, and the chairs before the cafés begin to fill. One chooses to dine in the open air, and there is the Restaurant Périgourdin in the Place Saint-Michel. . . little pink lights on the table, and such cooking as the angels must get, and Vouvray and old Porto Blanc and Vieille Cure to soothe palates corroded by the hundred brews of prohibition. . . and beyond the Place, the river, and beyond that, Notre-Dame, old and wise and vague in the darkness.

And after, one walks, perhaps, westward beside the river, past the bookstalls, now tidily closed and locked along the quais. And the moon comes up smokily and throws a silver edge along the prone black colossus of the Louvre. And still further west, the obelisk, and beyond the Cours La Reine, pricked out with lights through the blue haze among chestnut trees. Yes, there is always Paris. . .