Parisian Jottings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 176, 15 October 1927, Page 27 (Supplement)

Parisian Jottings

An Hour’s Stroll on Sunday Morning

Written for THE SUN

by E. S. Harston.

PARIS is fun. That is obviously why all good Americans want to : go ther© when they die, and why t the doubtful ones take no chances but < go there now. i One of these "watched an English- ( man diligently eating escargots, which < sound better than snails, but are ] otherwise much the same. Her fea- \ tures radiated disgust. To show her 1 own refinement she took a nice glass of port wine with her hors d’oeuvres. ; And a similar expression crossed the Englishman’s face. After all one can drink rort with sardines anywhere, if ! one is *o incredibly constituted, but ]

no one can eat vine-fed, pedigreed Burgundian aristocrats to better purpose than at this very restaurant. They taste like shell-fish, perhaps better, and come out quite docilely when beckoned with a fork. They are certainly better fnn than port and sardines. Too many people have tried to describe Paris food. The best way to deal with it is to eat it. It is French, Kalian, Alsatian —whatever you like — even perhaps English, if anybody wants it. And it is the only thing besides the taxis that is cheap. What a place for a trained palate and a schoolboy’s appetite and digestion! At night the city moves northwards from the river towards theatre-land and Montmartre. The serious-minded foreigner, if any there be, may go to the opera. But the tourist goes to the Folies Bergeres, where the girls are nude but not nasty, and exhibit a cheerful pride in their pretty forms;

where they blend in tableaux of dazzling beauty; and where dancing troops of English girls give displays of concerted dexterity that are almost incredible. Or he goes to the Casino de Paris, a similar show plus Maurice Chevalier, big and debonair, with a protruding lower lip and sheepish grin which says: “I know I am an ass; but isn’t this fun?” And it is fun. The boulevards are just as amusing as the set entertainments. A halfman powdering his nose in a little pocket mirror as he minces along; Segrave’s scarlet Sunbeam fresh from hi a American recnrdaj a small

9 h.p. car a bit sunburnt after crossing the Sahara; a group of solemn stamp-sellers on chairs beneath the trees near the Marigny, their sets, and “obsoletes and rares” on trays on their knees, their exchanges in baskets beside them while, noses in magazines of philately, they keep a weather eye lifting for a possible buyer; a batch of little goat cars waiting to show their paces down the avenue of trees; the cars and the people; an antediluvian cabby, poor old chap, with his tall, varnished hat, his battered cab and old tired horse; and a smart dog-cart, equally anachronistic, but with a spanking pair of chestnut cobs. All this, and more, is the fruit of an hour’s stroll on a Sunday morning. Cross the river by the great bridge and walk down the huge open square to the Invalides, and then taxi along the lie to Notre Dame, with its carved doorways, the rich mellow grandeur of the stained glass, the

magnificence of the altar, and, above all, the leaping aspiration of its fluted columns. On one of the columns is a tablet to the memory of one million British dead, the majority, of whom rest in France. Above the tablet are the Royal Arms, with the arms of India above, and, an unexpected touch of intimacy, those of New Zealand below. Canada, Australia, Newfoundland and South Africa are on each side. This wonderful edifice is called Notre Dame de Paris, but it is more than that. All France and all the British Empire have a share, and the nroud memory of many a gallant

spirit from far away New Zealand is commemorated on this simple tablet. After this one was able better to appreciate other aspects of Paris; the quiet mellow harmony of the Place Vendome; the dignity of the Rue Faubourg St. Honore with the President’s home at the iSlysde and the splendid old British Embassy; the wonderful columns of the Madeleine; the hieroglyphic covered obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the real home of which is back at I,uxor in Karuak, where a similar column lies shattered where it fell —all part of the inarticulate appeal of the great city. And how much of Paris is all this? Only one visitor’s hasty impression. But it is enough to show why Paris is what it is; why the Parisian in his heart feels that all dwellers beyond the gates are barbarians; enough to show why the roots of French patriotism strike so deep, and to realise that it Is just and inevitable. Paris.