I

Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.

I was only four years old when I was first in Paris and talked french there and was photographed there and went to school there and ate soup and had for early breakfast and leg of mutton and spinach for lunch, I always liked spinach, and a black cat jumped on my mother's back. That was more exciting than peaceful. I do not mind cats but I do not like them to jump on my back. There are lots of cats in Paris and in France and they can do what they like, sit on the vegetables or among the groceries stay in or go out. It is extraordinary that they fight so little considering how many cats there are. There are two things that french animals do not do, cats do not fight much and do not howl much and chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.

Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful and exciting.

So I was in Paris a year when I was four to five and then I was back in America. A child does not forget but other things happen.

A little later in San Francisco there was more french.

After all everybody that is everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves that is writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.