The Paris That Keeps Out of the Papers

Revealing, for the First Time, Some Little Known Facts About the French Capital

DOROTHY PARKER

"TTNVARIS! Who docs not love her? Paris, belle, la brave, la raw, la rainy; as old as birth, as young as April, as mournful as a myrtle-vine, as gay as a sequin, as cold as a son-of-a-gun. The Paris of Gabrielle d'Estrees and young Henry, of Robespierre and Danton and the white-haired Widow Capet, of Desmoulins and his sad Lucile, of Mr. and Mrs. Homer F. Blinch, 6 Pershing Terrace, Homedale, New Jersey. Paris—yours and mine and Aunt Laura's!

Come with me for a stroll along her curling streets, peopled, for us who love her, with a silvery company of memories, some thrilling, some tender, some clean. We may start, if you like, from this sidewalk cafe where, if we only sit long enough, everybody we never wanted to sec again will pass us. Perhaps we might even linger for a liqueur or two, because 1 really don't sec that there is going to be so much in this for me. There! Laughing a little, and exchanging hats with one another, we set forth.

Here we are at the Place de la Concorde! Let us stop for a moment at the corner of the Rue Royale, and lay our little wreaths of silence on this neglected altar of history. For it was on this very spot on a certain hot July morning that there stood a short, dark man, pale and nervous, a lock of hair escaped down his forehead from under his too-largc hat. That man was Roy F. Dounce of Fall River, that still Summer day—oh, Mrs. Dounce, Mrs. Dounce, is not the date burned on your heartr —was Julv 26, 1923, and it was the third time that morning that his left garter had come trickling down over his shoe and followed him along over the pavement like a devoted snake. Hush, do you not seem to hear some thin and ghostly echo of that immortal question—"Isn't this the damndest thing you ever saw in your life?"—he Hung from his torment to the glittering silence of the Paris sky?

\ FFAV steps more, and we must stop again A\ to pay tribute to the glamourous past. Here it was, on a starlit evening of the turbulent 1920's, that Lester I'!. Fishly*, Yale '09, after building himself up a little corker on a groundwork of Napoleon brandy with a lacy superstructure of champagne cocktails, suddenly mistook himself for Raqucl Mcller, and—half wistful, half insolent, all winsome,—stood tossing invisible violets to the delighted passers-by.

But we must not stay too long, for other memories beckon us. You may, if you like, go on into the Crillon bar and get terrible, but 1 shall stay looking at the Tuileries gardens, while the roar of dead battles pounds in my ears. For it was there that Junior McAnklc, son, they say, of an honest public accountant from Indianapolis, smacked down a little French girl during the famous hoop altercation, and made a laughing-stock of her right knee. And it was under that cropped tree that Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Croop fought one of the bitterest engagements of their Thirty Years' War. Right there he stood, and fired at her that redhot shot, "You must think I'm madeof money!" And she, as quick on the trigger as he, let hhn

have back her sizzling reply, "l do not think you're made of money, cither!"

But come, let us take one of these picturesque taxis, for my old dog trouble is coming on me again. We will choose for our driver this kindly fellow with the razor cut from eye to chin. How gaily he pilots his little car through

the traffic, and what fun he gets out of honking that lusty little horn of his. Happily, we remind each other that all Paris taxi-drivers must be examined as to their sanity every six months, and we laugh to think, lucky us, that our boy must be about seven weeks overdue. Look! Another quarter of an inch, and that sight-seeing bus would have made a bum out of our gallant little craft. We struggle, not quite successfully, to hide our smiles.

dll, doucernent, driver, doucernent here, for A\ we are 'passing the spot where F. Scott Fitzgerald, one wild black night, bought the 13 by 18 rug from the astounded Armenian street-vendor, and, a few minutes later, lost it —a feat before which the notorious losing of the bass drum pales to the commonplace. A little farther on, although historians debate the exact spot, Donald Ogden Stewart, at five minutes before midnight on July 1, 1925, tiling himself into a taxicab and cried hoarsely to the driver, "To the Bastille, and drive like the very devil! I've got to get there before it falls!" There is nothing but a cracked pavingstone, now, to mark the place where Seward Collins first used the word "paroxvsm" in a sentence—you remember how it goes, "Paroxysm marvelous city"—and no more than a thin line of moss to stamp the spot where Robert Benchley and Ernest Hemingway had that big philosophical discussion about the meaning of life. Yes, it was right here that the trenchant Benchley cleaned up the whole matter forever. "No, but really," said he, for posterity, "life is a pretty funny thing" . . .

Wherever we look, History has trailed her rich robes before us. This little cafe, so long ago that you would shoot me for a liar if I went into dates, first went empirical and served what was later to become the queen of French hors d'rjeuvres—the unborn radish; that gay and glittering restaurant our grandchildren wiil hail as the place whose orchestra, during the momentous Summer of 1926, never once rendered Tea for 1'evo. Our heads spin with the glamour of it all.

And here we are at the Place Vendbrne! Here is where Chopin died, and a dogged Corsican named Coty opened up a shop of pleasant fragrances, and the Bankers' Trust company agreeably and persistently gets our mail all mixed up. And here is the Hotel Ritz, where, if we walk past several hundred wards of showcases filled with rhinestone hand-bags and little enameled clocks that only mark the sunny hours and embroidered lavender pajamas and other souvenirs to catch the easy eye of the visiting firemen, we will come to the Bar. There, they say, a man was once overheard speaking French ; and on a clear day, legend has it, you can still see the stains of his blood. You would like to see for yourself? You would, really? Then let us dismiss our light-hearted driver and wish him good luck, because a bov who depends upon his brakes as he does is going to need it.

So, happy and dazzled and healthily tired, we pass on into the Ritz bar. And so another day in historic Paris is shot to pieces.