Paris—1926

How Modern Life Has Taken the Colour and Romance From the French Capital

THEODORE DREISER

YOU know it is almost impossible to say at once—and clearly—what all has happened to it—so much has happened, (and yet so little physically). There may be those who will insist that nothing has happened—that it is as entrancing as ever. For there it stands as in 1912, for instance, (when I was there last), or in 1895, 1890 or 1900, when all America, to say nothing of England, Brazil, Scandinavia, South Africa, Australia, was allured and enraptured by its spiritual as well as its physical romance. NotreDame is as it was then, for instance, except for street cars in the open square before it! The Louvre, the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine, the Cluny Musee, the Eiffel Tower, the this, the that. But none the less a change— and what a change!

The same buildings. Ah, yes. The same streets. Quite the same. The same throngs. Precisely—if you will—only much thicker. But the mood! Never! Or the romance, the inspiration! Not a trace! You may walk and walk, visit the Louvre, the gardens of the Tuileries, Notre-Danie, the rue de la Paix— so exotic and rare in 1912—Maxim's, L'Abbaye Thélème, the Cafe de Paris, St. Etienne du Mont, the Bois—you will not recapture it. Nor will you, by following this and that hint as to this and that restaurant, this and that group, this and that personage and his following or circle—come upon it. For I was taken to the Dôme, of course, the Cafe Scandinavie, Rissot's, Pentaud's, La Reine Pédauque, the Cafe Russe. But where that delicious rare mood of Paris that I remembered?

ALAS, over each and every place, each and every street, each and every personage or institution—a pall, as of something from which the living spirit of the older France had completely evanished. Cars and taxis buzzing here and there like flics. A bedlam of horns. Your life in danger at every crossing. Restaurants quite full of lunchers and diners or loungers sipping coffee or liqueurs— but of this other spirit not a trace. I tried haunting the old book-stalls on the left bank —those old, faded, delightful stalls. You recall how quaintly, gaily, jauntily, and yet somehow mournfully they reminisced to you of older and grander and lovelier things connected with the history of Paris and France.

Listless, dispirited. No flare in the sellers. None in the buyers. Not a trace. And down along my much beloved Seine—just below, large and new docks or platforms for the landing of brick, stone, sand, cement. And worse— endless rows of the most commercial of barges —towed through the heart of the loveliest part of Paris and under the bridges Napoleon built, by smoky, noisy, belching tugs throwing a choky pall over these very book-stands. And beyond these rows again—along the various quays that make the one long river drive—roaring, bellowing trucks or lorries shocking to their death all peaceful dreams in regard to old books and the older things they tell of. And in the French papers to which 1 resorted, sitting on a bench in a park, not a trace of those old and so important discussions relating to the artistic plans of the coming winter— nothing of who, where, what—of the new day art as opposed to the old.

I said to a newspaper interviewer who came to see me about this time that an older and most glorious artistic period must obviously have closed and that no new one, in so far as I could gather, was thrillingly evincing itself as yet. And he agreed. "There is something wrong with France," he said. "We have no plays worthy of the name, no books, no sculpture, no paintings that can be spoken of as carrying on either Matisse or Gauguin on the one hand or Corot or Daumier or Le Page or Monticelli on the other. It must be the war or the fall of the franc or this new commercialism that has seized this country—the craze to make money and be rich like America, if possible. Certainly there is no artistic or spiritual go to France," (and by France he meant Paris), "just now." And I will say that my own emotional reactions to all that 1 saw bore him out.

EUT is this the true answer, I asked myself? Or am I just fourteen years older and growing less sensitive, or, because of the lapse of years, more pessimistic? Age certainly does have a ruinous effect on most of our dispositions, 'tis true. And in quest of the truth as to this I think I questioned every possible person from chauffeur to sculptor, or critic, or painter, or actor—questions without end. How did Paris strike them now? What did they think of it as compared with the Paris of before the war—or the Paris of 1895—or 1900, say—if they were old enough to know? And in solemn confirmation of all my fears all but one agreed with me that there was something radically wrong. And that one who did not, had been until but a few months before an exile from both France and America and only now permitted, and that incognito, to bask in the, to me, somewhat jaded vivacity of the city. But after the dispiriting wastes of Russia, Poland, Finland and Lithuania, could one, as I then asked myself, trust his voluble praise of the gaiety and spirit of this to me almost wholly colourless world?

There is a difference, I think, in the very approach of the French themselves to the various things which before the war were all so precious and even sacred to them—their public buildings, monuments—like the Pantheon, the tomb of Napoleon, Notre-Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Cluny Musee—alas, a score of things. There was a time—and that before the war— when so national a thing as the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Samte-C hafelle, the Cluny, the Carnavalet, the Pantheon, the Trocadéro, seemed to be invested with a kind of glory, of reserve and reverence and yet a meaning-to-be-used— in quietness and peace—a sense of welcome over all. But to-day all things are charged for, in Paris as throughout Europe—all public sights, I mean. And worse yet, they seem to be looked upon as commercial assets rather than objects of beauty and historic worth.

Enter the Cathedral, Sacre Coeur, SaintGervais, the Pantheon, the Petit Trianon to-day, and in your path you will find either a nun suggcstingly jingling coins in a receptacle or an official barring you with gates and tickets—to see the resting-places of the celebrated dead of France, for instance, in the Pantheon! And always, of course, with the present-day crowds and guides, the latter bawling of dates and names—so that the matter of seeing anything and enjoying it peacefully and thoughtfully, with an undisturbed love for its beauty or its history, is no longer possible. In fact, sight or beauty-seeing—here now in Paris as elsewhere in Europe—has become a business— sight and beauty-showing for profit—and a most officious and irritating one. 200,000 visitors to the Pantheon last year, and at so much a head! As many more to see the tomb of Napoleon! 500,000 taken up in the Eiffel Tower. 100,000 visiting the Cluny, the Carnavalet, or what you will. Well, all this may be needed to add to the revenue of a somewhat financially deflated country, but most certainly it takes away from the colour and charm of so perfect a city as Paris is, or was, at least.

FOR SO late as 1912—it was so late as then —of a Spring afternoon, as I recall it now, I walked along the left bank of the Seine to Issy—was it?—and oh, that delightful walk! There was a westering and toward the last a sunken sun, with twilight and a faint blue haze, and that indescribable trace of perfume—French perfume—in the evening air. And on the surface of the river to my right, a minute river steamer was bringing some pleasure-passengers back from somewhere—on the top deck a man with a mandolin accompanying himself to a song. And along the road on my side were French workingmen in those wide-seated corduroy trousers drawn in tight just above the shoes, which they were then accustomed to wear—their working-tools in a sling over their shoulders, their flat Gallic corduroy caps pulled jauntily over one ear. And as I walked I was seized with a strange elation, as was so often the case with me in Paris in those days. Romance! It danced in my heart! Dreams! They were evoked by the faint twinkle of a lamp just lighted on the right bank—the hard, sharp, cream-coloured walls of the French houses, with their barred gates and many-paned French windows opening out widely to the enticing evening Spring air. And despite any willing of my own I was siezed with an ache—a spiritual or psychic yen for I knew not what; And all because of what? Why, the charm and glory of many wonderful French presences—ancient or more recent— dead or still alive—then and there. Why, I said, to myself, and thrilled—Rodin is here—now —and perhaps at this hour making off for his dinner somewhere in this lovely city. And Zola. And Rostand. And Romain Rolland. I might seek him out if I would. And Monet, Manet, Degas, Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh—they are still here now and are creating and enthusing after the manner and traditions of this great capital, pouring afresh and as of old the mental and artistic stimulus that has made this city what it is. Sardou is here, and Sarah Bernhardt. And back of them hundreds of others like them—a now almost shadowy line of glorious figures that have lived and worked here, from Saint Louis to Napoleon, from Saint Genevieve to Joan of Arc, from Villon to Baudelaire, from Racine to Sardou. This is their city! These are their old haunts,—these old streets and old houses and old palaces and theatres and churches and parks in which they lived, studied, painted, planned, dreamed. Wonderful! To be in this glorious air, here and now! And all my days and nights there were as dreams, truly, so that I have thought of them unceasingly ever since.

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But what has happened, you may still insist. What could happen? Aren't the things that we all admired still there, and unchanging? Well, as I say, they are there, and some might add that nothing has happened to them. None-the-less I insist that everything that can change the spirit, and so the feel of a thing, has happened and is happening to all Europe, and to the entire world, for that matter. The patina of beautiful, or terrible, or miserable, deeds—such as the Bartholomew's Eve Massacre, the guillotine in the Place Vendome, the storming of the Bastille, the kings, courtesans, nobles, artists and adventurers in connection with the Tuileries, for instance—is being washed over and entirely away in places, and by a rising tide of the new, the different, the noisy, the efficient, the numerous, and the up-to-date.

Let us walk through the garden of the Tuileries, for instance, of a hard, bright Sunday afternoon, through swarms and swarms of people. And what are the thoughts that these once so lovely gardens evoke—thoughts, let us remember, unavoidably to be contrasted with those of pre-war days? Well, they are these. First, that because of the crush of the automobile and the taxi, and the bus, and the motor-cycle (the last the most damnable of all modern inventions), it is all too noisy and cluttered and hard these days—dreadfully too much so. The danger that one finds in crossing any road—even in the garden of the Tuileries. The loafers, the dust, the insufficient care of the grass and flowers. Once—but why be complaining and critical? None-the-less, one must remark of even these gardens and all else in Paris—as in all Europe—that infernal tourist throngs, (myself making a unit of one) do rob it of a certain needed exclusiveness which once it had, and which is fatally essential to the beauty of a scene such as this. Of all gardens, the Tuileries suggest silence—or at worst a twittering gayety, coupled with a general prevailing silence—rich and lovely costumes, dreams in nooks, the Sedan chair, authority and attendance. But here! If Watteau should see it now! Or Lancret! Or Boucher! Or one of the nobles of its past days! Let us hurry away—once and for all.

And the noise in Paris! God! What is the modem truck and auto doing to civilization, anyhow? We swim in a blare of sound. And in Paris even the street car has been introduced everywhere—into the plaza before NotreDame, in the plaza before SaintGervais, along the Boul' Miche, along the BouP St. Germain—everywhere! And this at a time when the abandonment of the same, owing to their rail rigidity, is being advocated everywhere. Yet here is a city credited with foresight and agile practicality that at this late hour is cumbering its almost unbelievable traffic problem with street cars! Worse, on account of the twisting streets they have no traffic regulations like we have in New York. Consequently each chauffeur equips his car with a louder and shriller horn each year and proceeds to blow it at least five times at each corner. And they open their cut-outs when and where they will—for the pleasure of hearing them! Add to this the trucks, the street-cleaning and garbage-collecting horses at night with their bells, and a hundred other small but sharp noises and you have a kind of inferno from which there seems to be no escape in all the city. Indeed, one hotel proprietor finally, out of sympathy, advised me to stop my ears with cork stoppers which I could buy, since they were being sold to the passing and obviously complaining tourists. I did not buy' the cork stoppers but I did sleep with my windows tightly closed —in September.

Indeed, it is startling to contemplate, in connection with Paris, but I am constrained to believe that modernism —and by that I mean the present-day practical utilization of all means, material as well as mental, to not only create but speed up the manufacture and distribution of all the various assumed aids toward a more comfortable and more general material wellbeing—is tendingto blur and even belittle a former serenity and refinement which somehow marked the Paris of even my time. I may be wrong, but either the war, or the fall of the franc, or the growth of material luxury in other lands—say the United States, for one—has somehow belittled and caused to seem trivial the older ideals of this once so glorious city. A form of hard commercialism has intruded itself everywhere. There is the change in the matter of creating fashions, for one thing. For instance I was told, and I assume it to be true, that the essentially creative and hence internationally celebrated fashion creators of Paris who once dealt with the rich and artistically exclusive individual as artist and client are no longer content so to do. Why should they be? At their doors, waiting to be admitted, stand scores and even hundreds of buyers representing large stores or wholesale industries the world over, and from each one of whom, for a single successful model he may take more gold than ever any single individual of however great wealth could afford to pay him. The up-to-the-minute buyer, for, say, Marshall Field in

(Continued on page 147) Chicago, or Wanamaker in Philadelphia, has seduced the established designer from his original custom. That one single commercial opportunity, which as I understand it has already been quite generally seized upon by these quite obvious geniuses of style, has already served to rob Paris of one of its most outstanding characteristics of but a few years since—the salon of the genius of style, with its accompanying throng of fashionable devotees.

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But there are so many things that arrest and even amaze one—and not exactly in a favourable way. The cheapness of the franc—for instance— as strange as that may sound to the covetous, yet painful because so obyiously unfair and also ruinous to the Frenchman—and luring, as I hear, hundreds of thousands of international leeches and loafers to come here and take advantage of it. Five francs (15 cents) to carry one to four people from the Gare de PEst to, say the Luxembourg or the Odeon. Or from the Place St. Michel to the Eiffel Tower! And a satisfactory meal for two in a hundred places, if you wish, for so little as twenty francs (60 cents). In other places—the vicinity of the Place de la Concorde and the Madeleine—wild prices— all out of proportion—intended for the wildest of wild Americans or foreigners of great wealth from anywhere, living at the Ritz and related robber caves. Ten thousand francs for a pair of rhinestone slippers and twenty thousand francs for a short fur coat.

And again, because of this very cheapness of the franc, the poverty of some of the French at this time. I had not suspected it, although the war and the fall of the franc might have warned me. Usually, if I read history aright, the French have proved a most upstanding and courageous people— their morale not easily disturbed. But is it so to-day? For instance, in walking along the Boulevards Sebastopol, Magenta, Rochechouart, de la Chapelle and others, I was reminded by the benchers and incidental figures among the pedestrians of figures out of the French Revolution or the worst days of our American slums, when hard times and the saloon were at their worst. The eyes of them—blood-shot, or strained* or defeated. And the clothes! Wretched! And their bodies the same. Dirt, or grime. And they sat so despondently or brokenly, singly or in couples or groups, on the benches —some muttering, others sighing or snoring in the noon-day or afternoon sun. Not infrequently one would find one or more lying huddled in a corner just outside the doorway of a church or an institution. They were so hunched, huddled, crumpled, dejected, or worse—a little wild or threatening, even—conclusion written large over all.

Great God! It can't be! I said to myself. I saw no such things as this before the war. And yet here, now, in this not wholly uncomfortable year of 1926, is this! I decided that the war must have worked havoc in France, at least. Or the fall of the franc has been too much for some. And I think now—and this in the face of an anti-prohibition mood in myself —that possibly the French saloon as such had better go. It is not beer and wine that they drink—which, taken in moderation, is only a tonic—but these people crave brandy, or the strongest drinks of any kind that they can get. And they sit and sip them with what decayed, ruminative eyes! It will not do. I saw no one drunk in Germany where they drink beer—that wonderful malt tonic—rather than dope in the form of alcohol.

But worse—and more of it—(pardon me if T sound like one of Job's comforters but I am here to report facts —not dreams)—one of the outstanding features of Paris before the war, as all know, was that phase of night life so closely related to the smart restaurants in the vicinity of the Place Pigalle and the Place Clichy, which opened their doors at midnight or thereabouts. The volumes that have been written! The eulogies! The anticipations that have been anticipated—these many years since 1 Even I, after an absence of fourteen years, and with the development of American night dub life in New York and elsewhere—Florida for one place—fresh in mind, was indined to think of them as they were in those gay butterfly days before the war.

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Perhaps you will recall how in 1912, say, you dined at the Cafe de Paris, hurried subsequently to a box at the Folies or a seat at the Grand Guignol, (and always with the feel of furs on your hands and the rumour of faint perfume in your nostrils), only to step out for a breath of air afterwards and then hailing a taxi speed to this same Place Pigalle or the Place Clichy to join the waiting line of taxis seeking to make the main entrance as quickly and as conspicuously as possible. Those hard Parisian arc lights. The shadows and figures of those narrow French streets. The whirl and blur of silks and velvets and flowers and perfumes and jewels and lights within. An American negro orchestra was something in those days. And the mood of romance and wonder and adventure in all those that gathered here to spend, say a thousand francs each. The little cotton kiss balls that were blown. The coloured lights that twinkled and all but went out—as the music softened and the dancers danced amid floating coloured balloons.

But enter to-day. And who are here? Not the Frenchman, of course, with his bitter memories and his lowered franc. Nor the Englishman, still struggling with the coal strike and the effects of a general strike and various trade and financial difficulties springing from that most destructive war. Nor the former rich and spendthrift Russian, now so hopelessly and meaninglessly drifting from land to land wherever his depleted and vanishing income will buy the most—or rather last the longest. (When the mark was at its lowest in Berlin, I am told, and he could get the most for his rouble there, there were between three and four hundred thousand Russians in Berlin—the drifters and wasters of the former smart Russian world. Then, when the mark was stabilized there, with the kronen subsequently to fall tp nothing in Vienna, he at once transferred himself to that city and its adr jacent resorts. And when chance offered and the kronen was in pari: stabilized there and the lira fell, as well as the franc, it was to Italy and France that he sped—to Rome and Naples and Genoa but mostly and most recently to Paris, since there, as he saw it, he could obtain a maximum of life for a minimum of roubles changed into francs.)

Americans are here, of course— some only. (For there are so many places now in Europe, you know—to say nothing of all the rest of the world. And they have seen so much and they hurry so fast to Stockholm, Barcelona, Naples. Cairo. Besides in New York and Chicago and Hollywood and Florida—is not all this there?) And there will be a Brazilian or two or three, and his lady. An Argentinian ditto—a few millionaires from South Africa or Australia, say. But is not the night club everywhere? They are dancing now and gambling in the Sultan's old palace. Indeed, his former throne room in Constantinople —the palace and throne room of Sultan Abdul, the Damned.

I sat in one of the most famous night places from midnight till three. There was a sprinkling of various nationalities, including a dowager English Duchess and her two grandsons. They talked of a yacht and Biarritz from whence they had just come. And the most interesting of all —three Germans and their lady friends. It seems that the Germans are the only ones in Europe who have money these days, in so far as I could see. But the general quality of this world now—well, no "kick". No novelty. No romance. For while there was a negro jazz orchestra playing Oodle-de-do and some dancers, and some champagne at five and six hundred francs the bottle—still what was here before the war—romance!—was not here now. No, nor in all Paris. It is simply not there—and rightly perhaps when one thinks of the War.

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But there is yet another angle to this—and here it is. The military prowess of the Germans—their unbelievable and terrible skill in the matter of making war,—as well as perhaps the horrors of modern warfare itself —has done something—or at least I think so—to discolour and mayhap even belittle the once so stirring import of the achievements of the French in connection with their own great if horrible revolution and their great Little Corporal in his triumphant overrunning of all Europe—which was distinctly a phase of France before the war. Do you recall how wonderful and even marvellous these things seemed to you before 1913? And how they were celebrated by the French as by all other nations. Napoleon. The French Revolution. The Bastille. The Place de la Concorde with its guillotine.

But was not that, after its fashion, celebrating murderous war—and all war? And is not war at this hour a sad and even a sickening thing? It is. And hence a Tombe de Napoleon in the western shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe in its Place de l'Etoile, the Pantheon, and even the Place Bastille with its pillar in commemoration of the fall of the same, have somehow lost caste. I do not believe that they have now, for the French any more than for the visiting stranger, the sensory or emotional "kick" that they had before the horrors of 1914 began. Pooh!—the French Revolution! Pooh!—the Fall of the Bastille! Pooh!—the battles of Wagram, Leipzig, Jena, Austerlitz. Think of the Marne! Think of Verdun! Argonne! Hill 108, Chateau Thierry, Chemin des Dames, Barry au Bac, Ypres! Go from Paris to Rheims, to Soissons, and see the ruined towns, the left-over trenches, the pill-boxes and the still present if rusted and crumbling bundles of barbed wire, the piles of shells besides the roads that skirt the dumps that were battlefields. Hear the tales of incendiary bombs and inflammable gases that set fire to their cathedrals and burned their cities. Napoleon! Arc de Triomphe! The Bastille! Go rather and look at the fields and fields and fields of white and black crosses, looking from a distance like white fences skirting a heath—or at night, like a pale white path traversing a hillside—and then see if you can get much out of the Arc de Triomphe or the Pantheon, or the Bastille or the Tombe de Napoleon. I couldn't. And I noticed how others went about in the same mood—and said so—volubly. It can't be done. The other thing is too near. The French mind is no longer so sensitively reponsive to these older "gloires" that thrilled it so before the war, and I question solemnly whether it ever will be again. Napoleon—and after him the French Revolution (not before) are glorious memories, of course. But when you glorify them—but more especially the Little Corporal—which was so much the thing before the war —then you raise the troublesome question of why if it was so grand for him to invade and lay waste and conquer for the glory of himself or the French, why or how can it be so amazingly much worse for the Kaiser—and so on. Well, that part of Paris is also in the shadow of something bigger and more terrible—don't you see? And so— But having said all this, I still wish to add that, fresh from one's observation of Europe in general, one can only remark (and this exempts Paris in part) that modernism, or materialism —or this craze for mechanical equipment—together with the growth and crush of population, is changing if not taking the colour from life everywhere—not only in France or Paris but everywhere. The crowds, the charges to enter a church or a castle, now common everywhere in Europe, the bawling' sight-seeing cars, the bawling officious guides! God knows, life was dull enough before the war—but now! And yet, in criticizing Europe, and more especially Paris—that former darling of my heart—I was constrained to think of New York, its material equipment together with its population (I'll say!), and a few other little defects concerning which I might rise to comment upon. But then again, I immediately asked myself, have these—for me—'taken all the colour and sparkle out of New York? And if not, why .complain of Paris? And to answer truthfully, I could only say, no—not out of New York, Not for me.

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For in spite of all I have said against Paris, New York in this respect —its pullings and haulings, one's being made to wait at corners, swept along like a chip on a stream by unbelievable masses, cuffed and bruised in the subway and on the "El"—and made so inconsequential that mere contemplation of one's atomic self is sufficient (at times) to cause at least me to wish to disappear—is no better. These fabulous masses—greater than those of Paris. These towering buildings.

The accumulated wealth. The eager, feverish urge to live in these swarms of gnats and flies—-I—if it does sound a little vain in one sense—the gnattiest gnat among them! Yet, and to this hour, is there not in New York romance for me? There is. And may not the Frenchman still feel concerning his Paris about as I do about my New York? He may. And so, in Paris* thinking of these things, and thinking also that in part and for related reasons I was condemning in Parish-crowds, autos, horns, commercialism-^-the very things that also affect New York—I was compelled at once to re-examine my charges and to try to discover, if possible, wherein lay the difference. And toward the last, after searching here and there, I was compelled to say to myself that if anything, in so far. as Paris is concerned, the reaction just set forth must have sprung in me from a feeling that the psychic pulse of Paris is to-day of a lower and less hopefiil and less creative tension than that of New York,plus—and here, for me, a sharper and more irritating contrast —the absence, in the case of Paris, and for the same reason, of course^of that lighter, gayer, more confident and at the same time less strident and so much more artistic, note of say fifteen, to say nothing of fifty, years ago—the Paris of the romances of Balzac, Hugo, George Moore, Du Maurier. (Oh, what a list could' be written here!); For say what you will—and in the face of this cheaper, duller, less aspiring materialism that now afflicts Paris, there is the definite absence of that glorious spiritual virility which was itsoutstanding characteristic even so late as fifteen years ago. Rodin, Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, the divine Sarah, Romain Rolland, Zola, Flaubert. And by contrast, naturally, even the presentday material virility of New York seems unbelievably thrilling and even inspiring.