THE FIRST TIME I SAW PARIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 6

THE FIRST TIME I SAW PARIS

f Rel pede things have happened or are about to happen which are likely to bring the land of France and the city of Paris, though 12,000 miles away from us, closer to New Zealanders. One is the setting up of a New Zealand Legation in Paris. Another is the arrival of M. Emanuel Lancial as the new French Minister to this country. The third is the fact that various celebrations will take place this year to commemorate the_ twothousandth anniversary of Paris-the anniversary, not of the founding of the city, which is hidden in antiquity, but of its appearance in history, thanks to Julius Caesar, who not only carried out the conquest of Gaul, which he completed before 51°B.C., but also left us a detailed account of this exploit. In this article, the first of a series which will appear from time to time, GORDON MIRAMS, who recently returned to New Zealand after working with Unesco in Paris, has set down some of his impressions of Paris to-day and life in France, _

T is now 18 months since I went to France, or rather to Paris, where I was to live almost the whole time; and partly because of laziness but mainly on principle, I have refrained until now, when I am back in New Zealand, from attempting to write down for publication any of my impressions of the country and its people. The laziness is easy enough to understand; the principle which held me back is the conviction that snap judgments are usually wrong and that it takes about a year for a foreigner in a country such as France, and in a city such as Paris, to acquire the knowledge, the sympathy, perhaps above all the humility necessary to appreciate prdaperly the atmosphere of his surroundings and the true quality of his hosts-and also for the comparisons which one inevitably makes with other countries, especially one’s own, to be based on something other than prejudice and partiality. * * * INCE I have been in London\on only three occasions of not much more than one weé@k each, you will know how

to treat it when I say that although I feel respect and admiration for London, for Paris I came to feel affection. It is familiarity which brings affection; and by the time I left France I was becoming so accustomed to the daily sights and sounds about me that I was taking them for granted. I was no longer continually aware that the language being spoken all round me was French; I no longer felt it necessary to remind myself that the thoroughfare along which I strolled nearly every day was the veritable Avenue des Champs-Elysées, and that the monument ahead was the veritable Arc de Triomphe. In brief, I was beginning to feel at home. It got towards the end that what caught one’s attention was to hear an English or an American voice-there are always plenty of those -and after a while one came to adopt an attitude of slight mental superiority towards many other fellow-foreigners and to dismiss them to the category of "obvious tourists." This, I am sure, is a stage which is passed througp. by every for-

eigner in process. of acclimatisation in every city in the world. It is almost as important a milestone as to start to find the scenes and people of your new habitation ‘being reproduced in your dreams. When that happens you know indeed that you are putting down roots into the once-alien soil. Yet in the case of Paris I think that this process of acclimatisation is likely to be accelerated by tHe fact that Paris is, in every repect and despite its size, a very intimate city. It is much more intimate than, for instance, London. For London sprawls hugely

in all directions, while Paris, lying within the basin of the Seine, is so contained that, on a fine day from the Tour Eiffel, the top of the Arc de Triomphe, the towers of Notre Dame, or the heights of Montmartre by the Church of the Sacre-Coeur, you can comprehend almost its full extent. Similarly, if you approach Paris from the high ground around Montmorency, it lies practically all stretched before you -the vista which has tempted so many invaders in the past. . THE RIVER, | IKE many other cities, Paris owed to a river its birth as a centre of human activity and thereafter, for hundreds of years, its political and economic fortunes. The Seine was the cradle of the French capital. Back in those days two thousand years ago when the place first emerged into jistory through the pages of Julius Caesar -the anniversary which is ‘being celebrated this year-there was already a stronghold of the Gayls on the island where the Cathedral of Notre Dame

rises to-day: already the place was @ junction, a market, a hbalting-place, a relay-station for transport at the join of two valleys. But to-day, despite its historic and prehistoric influence on the origin and destiny of Paris through the facts of physical geography, the River Seine is much less a waterway than, for example, the Thames; so much less a great artery of commerce, and so much more a pure adornment -to the place-a ribbon to beautify the city rather than a rope to haul in the trade of the world. To give the contrast a New Zealand parallel, I would say that the Seine stands to Paris now in very much the same relationship as the Avon stands to Christchurch. UNITY IN DIVERSITY S for the city itself, it is not so much a great functional metropolis as a collection of separate but closely-linked communities, each one virtually ‘selfcontained in its shopping-centre and its essential civic services. Almost every one of the faubourgs and quartiers of Paris, and certainly each of its 20 arrondissements, shas a flayour and atmosphere all its own. Well-to-do Passy is no more like the Quartier Latin than Clignancourt (with its "Flea Mar- ket") is like the Opera district; but one is not less Parisian than the other. It is this quality of variety which makes Paris such a constant source of pleasure to the visitor: and it is this other quality of uniformity or unity in diversity which makes it so easy after a while for you to feel on intimate terms with all your surroundings. Once yow have recognised and captured the essence of one part of Paris you have captured it for the whole. The effect is heightened, and made more aesthetically real by the nature of the architecture, ‘its general uniformity and evenness. I do not mean that every part of Paris is artistically as magnificent as every other; that the broad and (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) breath-taking beauty of the ChampsElysées’ downward ‘sweep from the Etoile towards the Are du Carrousel can be duplicated among the network of narrow streets round, say, the Church of St. Etienne-du-Mont on the ‘Left Bank; or that the spacious grandeur of the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde, and the Tuileries Gardens has any exact counterpart elsewhere in the city. But there are fine buildings everywhere, even in the poorer quarters, not set off to such advantage by open spaces perhaps, but gaining something’ in compensation from the very juxtaposition of tortuous streets and from the sea of often crazily-leaning old buildings. which laps the very foundations of some ancient church ee Sigs 8%. emeraing from it. THE SKYLINE * ND there is the skyline of Paris: not the sharply indented outline of some skyscraper-dominated modern city such as New York, but the even, placid skyline of a city in which few buildings tise above five or six storeys-so that, is you look out from any eminence

across the far-spreading grey equality of the roofs of Paris, you are able to Tecognise immediately and welcome as familiar and well-beloved landmarks the leaping spires and towers of churches and monuments-of Notre Dame, the domes of Les Invalides and the Panthéon and, yes, even the platitudinous shape of the Eiffel Tower. The regularity of the Parisian architecture and skyline contributes much, I am convinced, to the atmosphere of oneness and intimacy, of being selfcontained and willing to be possessed, which the city impresses upon you. Something is added, too, by the French genius for display, for architectural window-dressing, so to speak. _Whether it happens by design or whether the effect is arrived at by accident (as indeed it often must be) nearly every public building and monument in Paris -+yes, even the Eiffel Tower-seems to have been placed to the best possible advantage, so that no matter what corner you turn there is always some new perspective, some unexpected facet of a familiar edifice framed at the end of an avenue or boulevard or just some

narrow street, to surprise the gaze and > at the same time make you feel’ at home. THE TREES UT, above all, perhaps, there are the trees of Paris as a factor in its homo-geneity-those trees which adorn so many of the great thoroughfares and avenues, sé many of the little parks and squares dotted all over the city, and which are massed on the outskirts in the Bois de Boulogne And the Forest of Vincennes; those trees which somehow do miraculously burst into green alfnost ’ overnight with the coming of spring and which, in such a highway as the Avenue Georges _Mandel, form a four colonnaded green archway above the traffic; those trees which the Parisians love so much that, even in the freezing winters of their discontent under the Germans, they never thought of cutting them down for fuel, and are now rather horrified if an outsider suggests that they might well have done just that. So there are the frees in avenue and open space, like green strings and knots tying Paris together in one compact parcel. The. intimacy and magnetism of the Parisian scene has been much better

expressed than I could ever hope -to do it by that enfant terrible, Henry Miller, who whatéver else one may say about him, did know and understand his Paris. Take this passage from Tropic of Cancer: The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I don’t know what it is Pushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swiftmoving current, but a great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this land. I remember passing this way the other morning. ae ae waggon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking «through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river towards Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself: "Ash, spring is coming!"’ And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But it was not only this-it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people-the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth, it seems to me, And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls. :