THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 271, 1 September 1944, Page 10

THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS

(Written for "The Listener" by

A.M.

R.

ARIS is free as this article goes to the printer. It was free when our contributor A.M.R. entered it 11 years ago; and although Paris at war cannot be the same place as Paris at peace, the things that do not change mean more than those that do. A soldier entering the city this week by the St. Denis Gate will see very much what A.M.R, saw in 1933. 2 ------------------------

E jolted into Paris through the St. Denis Gate and the still in-building suburbs that straggle out beyond the old City Wall into the countryside. It was the evening of Whit Monday and holiday traffic tearing home on the wrong side of the road made cycling a lottery of death. The "Pistes Cyclableés" between pavé and footpath proved mendaciously named exc to the youths in yellow singlets on balloon tyres who shot across open drains and in and out among the diners on the clay sidewalks. Nevertheless with nothing smashed except nerves and some spokes we tremblingly picked a passage through Montmartre where vegetable and old clothes stalls mingled with still more footpath cafés at which sippers sat table by table in evening dress and day dress. Finally in the warm evening we sighted the trees and shrubs of our night’s lodging, the Bois de Boulogne. Amid:a desert of trampled newspapers and paper bags one picnic party was still belatedl&A emptying its bottles. "Is it that one is permitted to camp in the Bois de Boulogne?" we timidly inquired. For answer pere de famille sweepingly indicated the litter around him. "Everything is permitted-in the Bois de Boulogne,’ he commented as sweepingly. Accordingly we picked on a sheltered spot among the shrubs where concrete troughs wound about in what, given water, would have been ornamental streams, and piled up, to provide soft repose, the best-preserved of the Paris Soirs that had been scattered to make a Parisian holiday. Music lulled us to sleep from where a horizontal Milky Way percolated among the black tree stems. I crawled out of our tentlet in morning sunshine to see an old fellow regarding it intently from across the concrete of the étang. He was apparently a park keeper-hard though it was to believe that French parks kept keepers. When he saw us stirring his interest and concern burst forth in-a Niagara of fluid French. "Pistol? Revolver?" we inquired at last, thoroughly mystified. "Merciful God!" he cried in a crescendo, "You rest here still living, you other aliens, and you have possessed no arms! This Wood nourishes bandits and polissons. Be so imprudent never again, I implore you." i oS — "THAT night, however, we had found ‘" another Paris when looking for water. Led on by the music I have mentioned we had come, hardly more than an empty-bottle’s throw from our camp, upon the Gaie Paree of the novyelettists, Payrus of the Towrists, the publicised Paris of pleasure and cash-down romance. It was the Pre Catalan cabaret, a blaze of electric lights and paste diamonds. In a pillared hall open/to a little lake

among the trees, stuffed shirts and powdered backs were enjoying (or pretending to enjoy) {the constipated gooseguts called paté de foie gras and the fish jam called caviare. Waiters floated across the polished floor to serve them. A night-shift of swans deployed across the star-strewn lake to charm them. Then in the morning we proceeded, down avenues impressive in their expansiveness, into the city that we all know. First the Etoile, the "star" hub of

a wheel of avenues where the huge bulk but perfect proportion of the bas-re-liefed Arc de Triomphe in the centre turns into midget motor-cars the ceaseless whirl of speeding traffic around its base. Then along the broad Champs Elyssés, double-lined with foliage, into the concrete acres of the Place de la Concorde. Pavement gave the public (we noted) space for demonstrating when they desired it: fireplugs beside the monuments gave the police waterpower to disperse them when liberty had had enough. Next, past the Madeleine and the Louvre, we gaped down the paved quais into the stone ship anchored in the Seine. This, the Ile de la Cité, is the seed from which Paris, and France, has grown. The Romans found it an oak stockade behind the rushes of a mudbank in the river. They left it with quite a town on the south bank opposite-called the Latin Quarter ever since. « Then back through the "Garden of Plants" (and Animals-it was the zoo), across the concrete-bulwarked, shipshaped island where Notre Dame’s intricate gargoyles and pinnacles amaze the tourist and its great stained window awes him, into the serried canyons of plate-glass. ° * ae * O you know Rue Jean Jaurés? No, it is useless casting your mind over a life-time’s stories of Paris. Memoirs y*

of the Brighter Bloomsbury of the artists, would-be and has-been, make no mention of it either. It runs, dead straight and wide, north-east, out beyond the city core within the circle of the demolished Wall. It is flanked by timber yards and brick-yards and the blank high walls of factories. Trams clang and lorries rumble from the hissing railway yards. And when the whistles shriek, grimy men and girls pour out into the warren of smaller streets nearby and the next shift step into their shoes be_hind the ceaseless machines. This is Aubervilliers, typical of the industrial sapwood round the heart of Paris. But if you too knew a pastor (or a curé ‘or trade union leader) in such an area you were a lucky tourist. Paris the magnificent, the city of culture, gaiety and shopping, we all know before we get there. Paris the speedlawless and unfinalised, the city of neck-to-knee public conveniences, fiacres too rickety to gain a New Zealand roadworthy certificate, drivérs too erratic to retain a licence in Britain, and. roads too forgetfully surfaced to be endured in an American village — this Paris we meet when we arrive. But it is quite possible to arrive and depart without having glimpsed the third Paris, But do we need to? Poverty and toil are the same everywhere.