Americans Prefer Europe

Clorinda Discovers For Herself the Esoteric Amusements of Post Bellum Paris

PAUL MORAND

FART II

PEAN-CLAUDE L. of Paris (France) arid (Aorimla W. of Paris (Texas) have been at the Ritz for hardly two weeks when they receive a card from the Countess of Austerlitz. It is an invitation to dinner. Always prompt, the young Frenchman enters his wife's room just as she is putting the final, touches to her own toilette.

JEAN-CLAI DF. : And your diadem?

CLORINDA: Are you sure that I should wear one? 1 had just been thinking of having it made over into a bracelet.

JEAN-CLAI DE: In such homes as that of Madame d'Austerlitz, cherie, you must wear a diadem.

CLORINDA: It will turn out the same as it did with my long dress the other day . . .

JEAN-CLAI DE: What long dress? . . .

CLORINDA: YOU have a short memory. Didn't you ask me to have my dress lengthened, on Saturday, when I was to take tea with your mother's old friend, Madame de Charleval? In order to please you, and not to seem out of place among a set of "toney" old ladies I wore a lace dress and a riding hat with a black bird of paradise—and didn't I stumble into a dancing party? Rive gauche dansingue, absolutely. All the furniture sold, the old servants replaced by hired valets, and everyone doing the black bottom in the middle of the afternoon, yes, at the height of Lent. All these grandmothers had dresses above their knees, and hoy friends, and glass flowers in their hair, and geranium-coloured rouge on their lips. The first person I met was a negro.

TFAN-CLAUDE: You exaggerate. It was a pious exception. 'They were rehearsing the new dance which the Pope has prescribed for Christianity, to replace the Charleston.

CLORINDA: Not that l am complaining. Nothing amuses me like these elderly French women who have gone wild.

JEAN-CLAUDE (in irritation) : It is America's influence.

CLORINDA: And all these beauty parlours, these flesh conservatories, are nourishing as vigorously in Paris now as in New York.

JEAN-CLAUDE: Alas! 'ton are right. No one laughs anv more, for fear of getting wrinkles. The cuisine has degenerated because all tin* cooks have gone into society. We are in an era of canned lood. (The onlv chance one has of dining well is to get invitations from the cooks themselves.) But, thank God. there are still a few salons of the old style. M. de Bellac is a man of quality, for instance, you must admit that.

CLORINDA: Yes, indeed!

JEAN-CLAUDE: Remember the dinner he gave us: signed furniture, authentic tapestries, family silver . . .

CLORINDA: That dinner cost me more than 50,000 francs. I bought a secondhand organ which I could not possibly have any use for, merely to oblige our host. As to the ancestral furniture, it had all been rented from Jacobsohn: remember we found it the next day on the Rue de la Paix. JEAN-CLAUDF: IS Europe to blame if it is for sale, and if our best families are on the rocks? Perhaps the time will come when they will even sell the rocks. Meanwhile, let us be going. It is getting late.

Clorinda and Jean-Claude arrive at the home of the Countess of Austerlitz. They are led into a magnificent Empire salon, gold and white, a lackey in formal livery on every step, autos parked in the court, Swiss halberdiers. Jean-Claude, with a satisfied air, seems to be saying to his wife: "Wasn't I right? Isn't this the grande noblesse of the time of the Empire?" Autographed photos of kings on the tables, all of them betraying by their expansive scrawl the childish vanity which sovereigns feel on signing their names. Furniture from the Tuileries and from Compiegne, ornamented with the golden bees of the Empire. Jean-Claude shakes hands with a few comrades of his own age, the son of the house among them, and speaks to them familiarly, hut otherwise he does not appear to know many of those present.

THEY go in to dinner. Clorinda asks the guest next to her where he intends spending the summer vacation. "At Juan-les-Pins! Naturally. I have rented my place in Gascony, a frightful thirteenth-century barracks with more than thirty-five hundred acres, to some Italian farmers. I adore the French Riviera. And the sun baths, if they are taken in the right amount. . . For fifteen thousand dollars I bought a little rabbit hutch with a shower and a bed. I have a garden with three pines and a hundred thousand mosquitoes; it is exquisite! And I have such charming neighbours at Juan-les-Pins. Freddie Douxmesnil, the son of Lord Dubbleday, has a place there, and keeps a tailoring establishment at Cannes and in the Faubourg Saint-Honore. He himself embroiders delightfully. This lad on the left, Adhemar de Saint-Yse, the little blond, is from there too."

"From where?"

"Why, from Juan-les-Pins!"

"Who is M. de Saint-Yse?" asks Clorinda. She cannot see him very well, the smoke is so thick, for after the soup everyone has pulled out cigarettes.

"He is the social representative of advanced art. A kind of intermediary between Montparnasse, the Rotonde and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He is the arbiter of all the Picassos and the most handsome of Marie Laurencin's shepherd dogs. Helene Perdriat and Foujita have no better impresario; the impresarios now being the ambassadors of art . . . He lives in an old mansion on the Rue de Chanaleilles, the ceilings decorated by Van Dongen."

The conversation lapses for a moment. M. de Saint-Yse can be heard speaking in a high-pitched voice:

"We modern artists simply can't stand the pedal in music, the impressionistic daub in painting, and sentiment in art. Volume, surface, syncopated rhythm: things well constructed; above all, things well constructed."

"He is an architect?" Clorinda asks.

"No, hut let a man's life be turned topsyturvy nowadays like the sets for a German movie, and he will forthwith begin talking of things being well constructed, as the jargon a la mode would have it. Besides, Saint-Yse is an architect to an extent: as he happened to own some old abandoned hovels on the quais which no one could rent even for warehouses, he had them repainted, called them 'studios', furnished them with black divans, and now he rents them at handsome figures to young American girls who feel that they have a turn for sculpture and the pleasures of Europe. Europe is for Americans what the carnival of Venice was for Voltaire's kings."

Beyond the flowers on the table, some young people, the son of the Due d'Eze among them, are speaking of a soiree which they had attended the previous evening.

"What jewels! What tapestries! What livery!"

"And what costumes! The daughters of the house were ravishing in pale rose. It seems that they would he considered very good marriages ..."

"Where was it?" Jean-Claude questions. "Who gave this soiree?"

"Why, Rue de Grenelle, at the Soviet embassy. They showed Potemkin. The time is safely past when the Russians fed on spoiled meat. What marvelous caviar!"

Jean-Claude is speechless with astonishment. He smiles, but can ill conceal his bad humour.

TT)ASSING from one revelation to another, X Jean-Claude no longer risks his wife alone. Such and such a house in the ChampsElysees, which was once frequented by the best bourgeois society, has been closed and rented to a dressmaker; and she in turn does not sell dresses here, but automobiles and perfumes; for just as one no longer finds the same people in the salons, so the shops of the day always seem to sell something else from what you would expect them to sell. Europe has undergone as big a revolution as Russia, though it shows less on the surface. In Russia one set of tenants has gone and another has taken their place; in the rest of Europe no one has gone, but they are all living together, and often the former masters have become the servants of the very people they employed before the war.

CLORINDA: Didn't you say that the widow of Alexander Dumas kept a haven of refuge for the last survivors of a passing era—a kind of Noah's Ark where the French Academy could he found in all its meager integrity?

JEAN-CLAUDE: Alas, ma cherie, I have been told that the hostess has introduced opium smoking and the Academy has fled before an influx of gilded buddhas and this new and widespread form of the yellow peril.

CLORINDA: And where does the French

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Academy go now?

JEAN-CLAUDE: It can be found in the salon of a very charming woman, Madame de Preval, who 1 hear is young and pretty. The name is new to me, hut there will he no trouble in getting you an invitation, since the houses of Paris are no longer closed as they once were. The "bring your friend" style is in order, which puts the salon and the street on the same footing.

Once again the young FrancoAmerican couple are in quest of the old French traditions. Will they find them at Madame de Preval's?—A few days later, just off the Avenue du Hois, Clorinda and Jean-Claude enter the little hotel of this Madame de Preval who, they have been told, was the confidante of Anatole France during the last years of his life. There is no servant, hut tlie door is ajar, and they go on in. When they come to the salon they stop: it is in total darkness. Surely there can he no mistake, and their invitation really was for to-day?

. . . Then of a sudden a frightful racket, followed by an outburst of laughter and strident animal cries. 1 he electricity comes on, and they find twenty people standing on chairs.

"Pussy in a corner!" exclaims a blonde lady, who is none other than Madame de Preval. Anil she explains that she lias replaced the conversation of the past by children's games.

Some elderly gentlemen diligently climb higher, one on a buffet, another on llie mantelpiece. On the table there are cocktails, a phonograph, salted almonds, straws, all the paraphernalia of debauch proper to the 1920's.

Madame de Preval actually lias regathered the old academicians, but she lias sandwiched them in among her friends and some young women from Montparnasse who arrive astride motorcycles. Here the older generation is wholly at the mercy of youth. They are caught and made to w'ear dunce caps, and they must endure all sorts of practical jokes. Gray-haired historians dance ring-a-round-a-rosey; philologists play blind-man's huff, and philosophers leap-frog. Not without shame, they must all submit to the baiting of their juniors, like old clow ns who would rather sweep the tent than he turned out of the circus completely.

Wit has been dispensed with. "Cenj eral conversation," that flower of the | French salons, is a tiling of the past. No clash of ideas, no expert telling of anecdotes. Nowr the talk is of clothes, and the stocks of the North; African copper mines, and the prices for Picassos at Rosenberg's. When Jean-Claude was very young, if by any chance there was some mention made of literature in a respectable home, only Paul Bourget was meant. But no one ever invited intellectuals; and if Marcel Proust, with his orchid in his button-hole and his beautiful linen from Charvet's, would appear in a salon late, at the hour when all the others were leaving, this was because he was not suspected to he a writer. \\ here are those great circles of guests,

like the rings of Saturn, which gravely discussed the most vital problems of the nation? If there was ever a question of money, it was handled in the most cautious manner, as when some big financier, off in the corner by a window, would make arrangements for a loan. Now there is a muddle of foreign words, a tower of Babel. In every language the one topic is money, and you feel that nobody has any. Exotic princesses, political agents, or women attached to the League of Nations trail around after cabinet members trying to get tips on the market. Others take orders in milliners' shops. People now have hut one idea: to travel free of charge, to get living quarters for nothing, to buy their meals on tick, to he supported, hired, bought; and they are always on the look-out for combinations, for "combines."

"I can no longer find a buyer," said the editor of a large evening newspaper. "'Lhe good old days of the Versailles treaty are passed, when the press was generously watered from the secret funds of the universe. Now is a time of drought. Why, I went all the way to Manchuria to interview Chang Tso Lin, and do you know what he offered me? Two yards of cloth, very ordinary, and a nickel-plated tobacco box. I opened it and it had inside: 'Made in Moscow'."

Clorinda and Jeun-Claiule are back in their sitting-room at the hotel. Silence. Would Jean-Claude dare to repeat now his assertion, "In France nothing ever changes," which he had pronounced with such assurance while on the Majestic en route for Europe?

Lying buck in her chair, Clorinda eyes her husband ironically.

JEAN-CI.AUDE: YOU know, the years just after a war are always hard on human society.

CLORINDA: Don't preach in that morose tone, my dear, like the Bishop of Manchester. The fact remains that our dear Paris of 1927 must he much more amusing than your France of the past. The older France was rich, narrow in its ideas, and exclusive. Like all satisfied people, it was not popular. Look at France to-day. The whole world comes here; people enjoy being here, and they feel sorry for France because France has become a human character with engaging qualities which awaken sympathy. Even now, I no longer need any one to help me find my way about in this city which everyone visits hut so fewr really know. Paris is charming under all systems, because of its mild climate de luxe, and because of the supreme luxury, open-mindedness.

Jean-Claude: Atmosphere!

CLORINDA: Undoubtedly. You are scandalized because the country of your childhood has been changed for you; hut beneath its different exteriors, and however absurd it may appear at times, it remains the same old city—Paris, the only place where women can know whether they are still beautiful and men whether one is telling them the truth!