Americans Prefer Europe

A Conversation Explaining Parisian Society for the Benefit of Those Who Do Not Know It

PAUL MORAND

CABIN de luxe on the "Majestic". JeanClaude L. thirty-five Years old. of Paris (Prance) and Clorinda W., of Paris (Texas), twenty-three, are seated opposite each other. Nothing separates them except the. breakfast tray. A young Frenchman of good family, Jean-Claude lives in New York, where he is engaged in. business. Having passed from the trenches to Wall Street, he has hardly been seen in Paris since 1914. He has just married Clorinda. Wedding-trip. Jean-Claude is explaining to his young wife Parisian society as he left it. In the next article of this series, Clorinda,promise, will find out for herself.

CLORINDA(discouraged): It is hopeless. It does no good to listen to you, Jean-Claude, I shall never get used to it!

JEAN-CLAUDE: Yet you are getting used to me . . .

CLORINDA: But you are not France; you are a Frenchman in America. I knew how to pick the best morsel from the melting-pot. You're so sweet! (kisses him) You are like the ideal meeting-place of the two nations. The two (lags have the same colours, but differently placed . . . What I wanted to say, you see, is that I shall never get used to all these strange faces which express such complicated characters, all these things so much the opposite of what they seem to be, all these people who talk without saying what they are thinking, in short, all these denominations and titles. . . .

JEAN: SO important in republican countries.

CLORINDA: Your society is like your cities: thousands of little winding streets, odd and picturesque, and each with a new name, after every war or every revolution.

JEAN: My dear, don't let yourself be frightened. Don't refuse in despair to follow me through the city, and drop down on a boulevard bench to lunch on a sandwich. They do not know how to make sandwiches in France, anyhow. And besides a French déjeuner must not be swallowed hastily like American lunches: it is an important phase of social life.

CLORINDA: I am never hungry at noon . . .

JEAN: French cooking is the art of making people eat who have no appetite. French conversation is the art of thinking without being aware of it. And now, you are coming with me to visit my childhood friend, the Countess of Austerlitz, Grande noblesse of the first Empire, but one of the public places of Paris. Don't be surprised if you find Clemenceau there next to Caillaux, the royalist Marquis de Trianel with the bonapartist Princesse d'Iéna, L'Action Française and its enemy L'Humanite, musicians from the Institut de France alongside advanced authors who write for Russian ballets. These people will not eat up one another, having made a truce around the foie gras, as in Kipling the wild and the tame animals made a truce, in times of drought, around fresh water.

CLORINDA: Who is the Count of Austerlitz?

JEAN: lie is no longer. Like Monsieur du Deffand, he departed this life in silence, without ever having made a good remark or done a good act.

CLORINDA: Who presides opposite the hostess?

JEAN: Sometimes one person, sometimes another. Very often a prelate: Monseigneur de la Salle, who is the best eater, and perhaps the best talker in Paris. He makes sparkling witticisms, presides at important marriages, gives his hand to beautiful foreign women to kiss, confesses in their final hour republican socialist ministers lost in atheism, and he knows how to keep on the best of terms with the "reddest" of governments without ever getting into trouble with the Vatican.

CLORINDA: It is strange, for a fashionable house—with politicians, journalists, and clergymen ... It is quite middle-class.

JEAN: Dear, you do not know Paris. You merely got a glimpse of it in terms of lights and stations while passing through it as a flapper on your way home from school in Switzerland to your family ranch in Texas. . . . The value of Paris, you see, is precisely in its mixture of races and classes. Would one have to tell an inventor of cocktails that a drink ran he wretched or exquisite, depending upon whether or not he gets the proper proportions among its ingredients?

CLORINDA: Then according to you, if New York is the world's melting pot, Paris is its cocktail-shaker?

JEAN: Exactly. And since you hesitate to go with me,and are a little snob, I am going to take you to see a nice old friend of my mother, Charlotte de Charleval. You will be at the end of the table, which does not mean that you will be among the younger set—for there is none. The wrinkle, the monocle, and the moustache "a la gauloise," the deafness of the members of the "Agricole," the wise-cracks of the Jockey-club, the puns of the Academicians whose ill-will is blunted with age, the servant problem, the sermon of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the Catholic charities, make of this salon a region where the joy of living shoots up much like an orchid in Arizona. They will lay sly traps for you, to learn whether you dance during Lent. With a little more gaiety, you could imagine it almost as boring as good society in Spain.

CLORINDA: But where is "gay Paree?"

JEAN: I leave that to the tyros who never see anything of a city beyond its streets— which is to say what the city is not. Let us leave that to the adherents of Momart and of the Mouline Roudge. And now step into my sight-seeing car: I will continue my trip through the real Parisian world, the world which I know . . .

CLORINDA: "Le monde où l'on s'ennuie""?

JEAN: Look at me. I turn towards the passengers. Standing, I take my megaphone, which prevails above the tumult of the street, and I begin: "Now folks, this is the 'ouse of the everlastin' vidow of Alexandre Dumas, the oldest monument of Paris . . . This'ere lady is 33½ years older than the petrified forest and her salon has been rightly called 'the petrified salon' of French literature. It you look for the gems, folks, you'll have to find them under the stone surface and use a hammer too, etc. . . . etc. ..." You see, dear, to continue in earnest, there are more authors in France than readers, and for all these authors there are only a few chairs at the. French Academy. The only way to get a seat there is to go each day and drink the bitter port of Widow Dumas.

CLORINDA: I prefer the other widow Clicquot.

JEAN: YOU are young and strange: you must see everything. Admire the French Academy, which contrived to keep out such horrible Bohemians as Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. . . . Admire all these aspirants who give here, at the "théspoétiques" of the widow of Alexandre Dumas, the measure of their talent. Mere they throw praise in your face like bricks, and they react to irony much as though they were sitting on a tack. A refuge of all the invalids of thought. Here the poets, hungry bards and hysterical muses, pass under the majestic and romantic shadow of the great mulatto dramatist.

CLORINDA (politely): It's all right, with me.

JEAN: I remember once when, to avoid the elocution, I lingered in the garden. When I re-entered the house of Madame Dumas, I found it empty. Undoubtedly, the reception was over. ... I wandered from room to room . . . Finally, in the last salon, I found eighteen elderly gentlemen sitting in eighteen armchairs reading the Temps in consternation. They were candidates for the French Academy, and were following the account of the election of one of their rivals, which took place in the afternoon. . . .

CLORINDA (to tease her husband): As for me, I do not despise poetry. I will go to Madame Dumas'!

JEAN: I must warn you that in Paris the houses have no fire escapes.

CLORINDA: What does that matter, if I have a chance to hear your French geniuses, from Francis de Croisset to Edmond Rostand?

JEAN: I believe that Edmond Rostand is dead; but we can always offer you Maurice Rostand.

CLORINDA: Does Sarah Bernhardt often recite verse there?

JEAN: I believe that she is dead, but you will see Cecile Sorel there. I am very sorry not to be able to take you to visit her.

CLORINDA: Why shouldn't I go?

JEAN: Because Paris is the one city in the world where people are most concerned with actors without ever seeing them anywhere but on the stage. An old prejudice.

CLORINDA: Won't you take me to the theatre often, Jean-Claude?

JEAN: But, dear, a Parisian never goes to the theatre. The "Tuesdays" at the Français are nests for provincials who have read of such things in the novels of Bourget; as to the "loggia-between-columns" of the Opera, no one is ever seen there except eligible daughters.

(Continued on page 112)

(Continued from page 53)

CLORINDA: And I got married to go to the theatre! What are things like at Cécile Sorel's?

JEAN: High windows look out on those pleasant quais of the Seine, the the right bank of which was once occupied by kings and the left bank is now occupied by Americans. There is a positive deluge of marble and Coromandel lacquer. Panther skins are more plentiful than among hunters in Africa. The dining-room table, of white marble, would suit me perfectly as a mortuary slab. But the most important piece of furniture, the feature of the house, is the bed.

CLORINDA (weeping): So that is where you live!

JEAN: Wait, my dear; calm yourself. All Paris knows Cécile Sorel's bed. The magazines have photographed it, people file past it the way they do at Versailles, Cook's organizes daily tours there, it is almost a national property. Liberty, equality, fraternity. It has ceased to be furniture, it has become a general idea. It served as catafalque for the funeral of Victor Hugo, this monument streaming with gold, damask, and ostrich plumes, as baroque as the Cathedral of Mexico. Powdered valets, black ministers, excellent suppers, pink champagne. Why, Sorel is the last of the French tradition: diadems, balls at the opera, splendid attire in the weighing enclosure, the "pesage," of the steeplechase at Auteuil.

CLORINDA: I imagine it is like the Roman decadence set to music by Offenbach?

JEAN: Yes, with a slight official touch as well, like a reception at the Elysée.

CLORINDA: Are there other Cécile Sorels?

JEAN: The person who resembles her most (aside from Louis XIV.) is the Marquis de Piedmignon. Blond, discoloured, curly-haired, with white spats, quite fleshy, his legs stretched out in checker-board trousers, this nobleman still organizes pageants and cotillons. His rooms are lighted wholly by candle-light—there is no electricity. Each piece of furniture has a signature, in the wainscoting there are faded pastels by La Tour. They play revisions of old music, on instruments of the past, the viola d' amore or the spinet.

CLORINDA: Tell me, dear: are you quite sure that these salons, this world, have not lost their character since the war?

JEAN: I do not think so. The exquisite has always been rare. Read the newspapers and you will see that Paris is just as brilliant, as . . .

CLORINDA: But what makes you believe that these are the same people, and the same pleasures, as you have known? The foreigners, it is said . . .

JEAN: Only the foreigners of good society. Yes, the embassies and some very "left bank" Americans. Oh yes,— one place where I want to take you is the home of my friend Mrs. W. Handytoast, of Boston. She lives in a remarkable château near Dinard—and at Paris, Place des Vosges, she occupies the old Brinvilliers mansion (brick and stone). She gives charming comedies de salon. It is the pleasant and cultured women from abroad who add a charming and exotic touch to Parisian society.

CLORINDA: Just as in the novels of Edith Wharton, then?

JEAN: Absolutely. Within three days, my dear, we shall be at Cherbourg. The curtain will rise upon the scene which I have described to you. There will be one more new and charming French girl.

CLORINDA (after reflection, and a bit hesitantly): And if all that has changed?

JEAN (with assurance): In France nothing has ever changed!

(Continued in the July issue)