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PARIS
VISTAS
HELEN DAVENPORT
GIBBONS
[Illustration]
PARIS VISTAS
[Illustration: The Invalides from Pont Alexandre III]
PARIS VISTAS
BY
HELEN DAVENPORT GIBBONS
Author of "A Little Gray Home in France,"
"Red Rugs of Tarsus," etc.
WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
LESTER GEORGE HORNBY
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, December, 1919_
TO
A CRITIC
WHO LIVED MOST
OF THESE DAYS
WITH ME
FOREWORD
Webster defines a vista as "a view, especially a distant view, through
or between intervening objects." If I were literal-minded, I suppose I
should either abandon my title or make this book a series of
descriptions of Sacré Coeur, crowning Montmartre, as you see the
church from dark gray to ghostly white, according to the day, at the end
of apartment-house-lined streets from the _allée_ of the Observatoire,
from the Avenue Montaigne, from the rue de Solférino, and from the Rue
Taitbout. I ought to be writing about the vistas, than which no other
city possesses a more beautiful and varied array, that feature the Arc
de Triomphe, the Trocadéro, the Tour Eiffel, the Grande Roue, the
Invalides, the Palais Bourbon, the Madeleine, the Opéra, Saint-Augustin,
Val de Grâce and the Panthéon.
But may not one's vistas be memories, with the years acting as
"intervening objects"? Has not distance as much to do with time as with
space? Vistas in words can no more convey the impression of things seen
than Lester Hornby's sketches. If you want a substitute for Baedeker,
please do not read this book! If you want a substitute for photographs,
you will be disappointed in Lester's sketches.
The _monuments_ of Paris, ticketed by name and historical events to
tourists whose eyes have had hardly more time than the camera, known by
photographs to prospective tourists who dream of things as yet unseen,
are interwoven into the canvas of my life. The Gare Saint-Lazaire, for
instance, is the place where I was lost once as a kid, where I have had
to say goodbye to my husband starting on a long and perilous journey,
and over which I have seen a Zeppelin floating. Since Louis Philippe was
long before my time, the obelisk always has been in the Place de la
Concorde. And when you pass it, your eyes, meeting the Arc de Triomphe
at the end of the Champs-Elysées, the Carrousel at the end of the
Tuileries, the Madeleine at the end of the Rue Royale and the Palais
Bourbon at the end of the bridge, record vistas as natural, as familiar
as your mother's face in the doorway of the childhood home. Where else
could the Arc de Triomphe be? Of course it looks like that!
I shall not attempt to apologize for the autobiography that comes to the
front in my Paris vistas. Perhaps my own insignificance and unimportance
and the lack of interest on the part of the public in what I do and
think--impressed upon me by more than one critic of earlier
volumes--should deter me from telling how I lived and brought up my
family in Paris. But it is the only way I can tell how I feel about
Paris. Whether the end justifies the means the reader must decide for
himself.
H. D. G.
_Paris, August, 1919._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(1887-1888)
CHAPTER PAGE
I CHILDHOOD VISTAS 3
(1899)
II AT SIXTEEN 15
(1908)
III A HONEYMOON PROMISE 31
(1909-1910)
IV THE PROMISE FULFILLED 41
V THE PENSION IN THE RUE MADAME 51
VI LARES AND PENATES IN THE RUE SERVANDONI 63
VII GOLD IN THE CHIMNEY 76
VIII AT THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE 86
IX EMILIE IN MONOLOGUE 97
X HUNTING APACHES 104
XI DRIFTWOOD 112
XII SOME OF OUR GUESTS 119
XIII WALKS AT NIGHTFALL 132
XIV AFTER-DINNER COFFEE 142
XV REPOS HEBDOMADAIRE 148
XVI "MANY WATERS CANNOT QUENCH LOVE" 154
XVII REAL PARIS SHOWS 167
XVIII THE SPELL OF JUNE 181
(1913)
XIX CHILDHOOD VISTAS FOR A NEW GENERATION 193
XX THE PROBLEM OF HOUSING 201
(1914)
XXI "NACH PARIS!" 211
(1914-1916)
XXII AT HOME IN THE WHIRLWIND 223
XXIII SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS 231
XXIV UNCOMFORTABLE NEUTRALITY 243
(1917)
XXV HOW WE KEPT WARM 253
XXVI APRIL SIXTH 262
XXVII THE VANGUARD OF THE A. E. F. 269
(1918)
XXVIII THE DARKEST DAYS 277
XXIX THE GOTHAS AND BIG BERTHA 294
XXX THE BIRD CHARMER OF THE TUILERIES 307
XXXI THE QUATORZE OF TESTING 313
XXXII THE LIBERATION OF LILLE 321
XXXIII ARMISTICE NIGHT 326
XXXIV ROYAL VISITORS 341
XXXV THE FIRST PEACE CHRISTMAS 348
(1919)
XXXVI PLOTTING PEACE 361
XXXVII LA VIE CHÈRE 373
XXXVIII THE REVENGE OF VERSAILLES 378
XXXIX THE QUATORZE OF VICTORY 385
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Invalides from Pont Alexandre III _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The Madeleine Flower Market 16
Looking up the Avenue de l'Opéra 32
The Rue de Vaugirard by the Luxembourg 64
Château de la Reine Blanche: Rue des Gobelins 88
Where stood the walls of old Lutetia 120
The Panthéon from the Rue Soufflot 144
Hôtel de Ville from the Pont d'Arcole 168
Market day in the Rue de Seine 184
The first snow in the Luxembourg 224
A passage through the Louvre 256
In an Old Quarter 272
Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois 304
Old Paris is disappearing 320
The Grand Palais 336
Spire of the Saint-Chapelle from the Place Saint-Michel 368
1887-1888
PARIS VISTAS
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD VISTAS
My Scotch-Irish grandfather was a Covenanter. He kept his whisky in a
high cupboard under lock and key. If any of his children were around
when he took his night-cap, he would admonish them against the use of
alcohol. When he read in the Bible about Babylon, he thought of Paris.
To Grandpa all "foreign places" were pretty bad. But Paris? His children
would never go there. The Scotch-Irish are awful about wills. But life
goes so by opposites that when my third baby, born in Paris a year
before the war, was christened in the Avenue de l'Alma Church, Grandpa
Brown's children and grandchildren and some of his great-grandchildren
were present. My bachelor uncle had been living in Paris most of the
time for thirty years. My mother, my brothers, and my sister were there.
We Browns had become Babylonians. We were no longer Covenanters. And we
had no high cupboard for the whisky.
After Grandpa's death, the Philadelphia house was sublet for a year. In
the twilight we went through all the rooms to say good-by. Jocko, our
monkey-doll, was on the sitting-room floor. Papa picked him up and began
talking to him. Jocko tried to answer, but his voice was shaky, and he
hadn't much to say. Papa took a piece of string out of his desk drawer,
and tied it around Jocko's neck. He asked Jocko whether it was too
tight. The monkey answered, "No, sir." Jocko never forgot to say "sir."
We hung him on the shutter of a window in the west room where I learned
to watch the sunset. There we left him. What a parting if we had known
that the tenants' children were going to do for Jocko, and that we
should never see him again! It was bad enough as it was. It is hard for
me, even to-day, to believe that it was Papa and not Jocko who told us
stories about the fairies in Ireland.
A carriage drove us to a place called Thelafayette-hotel. It was very
dark outside and we seemed to have been traveling all night. Papa
carried me upstairs to a room that had light green folding doors. My
little sister Emily was sound asleep and had to be put right to bed.
Papa sat me in a red arm-chair. Beside it were satchels and Papa's black
valise. Wide awake, I looked around and asked, "Is this Paris?" I did
not see why they had to laugh at me.
A steward of my very own on the _Etruria_ told me that she was the
biggest transatlantic liner. People gave me chocolates until I was
sick. So Mama painted a picture of the poor little fishes that could get
no candy in mid-ocean. She made me feel so sorry that when I got more
chocolates I would slip to the railing and drop them overboard. Once,
before I had heard about the fishes, I was lying in my berth. After a
while I began to feel better and to wish that Papa and Mama had not left
me alone. My feelings were hurt because I had to stay all by myself. I
found my clothes and put on a good many of them. My steward came and was
surprised that I was not on deck. He brought me a wide, thin glass of
champagne. It was better than lemonade. The steward told me that by
staying in my cabin I had missed the chance to see the ship's garden. He
buttoned my dress and put on my coat. He found my bonnet. All the time
he was telling me how the ship's garden was hitched to the deck. He
carried me up those rubber-topped steps that smell so when your stomach
feels funny. He hurried all he could and got terribly out of breath. But
we did not reach the deck in time to see the garden. The steward said
that you had to get there just at a certain time to catch it. I wondered
how a ship could have a garden. He replied that he'd like to know where
a ship's cook would find vegetables and fruit, and how there were so
many freshly picked flowers on the dining-room table every day, if the
ship hadn't a garden. To prove it he brought me a plate of cool white
grapes--"picked before the garden went out of sight a few minutes ago,"
he assured me.
So the week at sea passed, and the next thing I remember is London. It
was not a pretty city. Too much rain and smoke that dirtied your frock
and pinafore. These funny names for my dress and apron, and calling a
clock Big Ben, and a queer way of speaking English, form my earliest
memories of London. No, I forgot sources of wonderment. The best orange
marmalade was bitter, and the tooth-powder was in a round tin hard to
open, that spilled and wasted a lot when you did succeed in prying the
lid off.
And in Paris I found that my dress was a "robe" and my apron a
"tab-lee-ay." This was worse than "pinafore," but not so astonishing,
because one expected French words to be different.
Which is the greater joy and satisfaction--always to have had a thing,
or, when you think of something in your life, to be able to remember how
and when it came into your possession? Paris is my home city in the
sense that I cannot remember first impressions of things in Paris. Of
events, yes, and sometimes connected with things, but of things
themselves, no. And I am glad of it. My husband did not see Paris until
he was twenty, and he learned to speak French by hard work. I have
always had a little feeling of superiority here, of belonging to Paris
as my children belong to Paris. But Herbert contests this point of
view. He claims that affection for what one adopts by an act of the
will is as strong as, if not stronger than, affection for what is yours
unwittingly. And he advances in refutation of what I say that he knew
Paris before he knew me!
"_Cinquante-deux Rue Galilée._" I cannot remember learning to speak
French. That just came. But standing on a trunk in the corner of a
bedroom and repeating _Cinquante-deux Rue Galilée_ after Marie is just
as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday instead of thirty years ago.
It is a blank to me how and when we came to Paris and how and when we
got Marie Guyon for our nurse. I recall only learning the number and
street of our _pension_, and the impressiveness of Marie telling me how
little kids get lost in Paris and that in such a case I mustn't cry when
the blue-coated _agent_ came along, but simply say, "_Cinquante-deux Rue
Galilée_."
Clear days were rare--days when it didn't look as if it were going to
rain. Then I would have my long walk with Papa, who didn't stay like
Marie on the Champs-Elysées or in the Tuileries, but who would take me
(Emily was too little) where there were crowds. We would climb to the
roof of the omnibus at the Madeleine and ride to the Place de la
République. Then we would walk back along the Grands Boulevards. Down
that way is a big clothing-store with sample suits on wooden models out
on the side-walk. One day Papa bumped into a dummy wearing a
dress-suit. Papa took off his hat, bowed, and said "_Pardon_." I thought
Papa believed it was a real man. So I told him that he had made a
mistake. But Papa replied that one never makes a mistake in being
polite. I used to dance with glee when we came to the Porte Saint-Denis.
For there, at the place the boulevard now cuts straight through a hill
leaving the houses high above the pavement, the pastry and _brioche_ and
waffle stands were sure of my patronage. Papa may not have had regard
for my digestion, but he always considered my feelings. I used to pity
other little children who were dragged remorselessly past the potent
appeal to eye and nose. The pastry places are still there on that
corner. And a new generation of kiddies passes, tugging, remonstrating,
sometimes crying. As for me, I beg the question. I walk my children on
the other side of the street.
One afternoon Marie took us to buy Papa's newspaper. When we got to the
front door, it was raining. So Marie left us in the _bureau_ and told us
to wait until she returned. But the _valet de chambre_ came along with
his wood-basket empty. He always boasted he could carry any basket of
wood, no matter how high they piled it. So we asked if he could carry
us. Immediately he made us jump in, and told us we must pretend to be
good little kittens, and little kittens were never good unless they were
quiet, and they were never quiet unless they were asleep. When we got
to our room, we could look right in at Papa and Mama through the
transom. We reached out and knocked. The sound came from so high up that
Papa looked curiously at the door. When he opened it we ducked down into
the basket, and were not seen until the valet dumped us out on the bed.
My first memory of a negro was in Paris. Probably they were common
enough in Philadelphia not to have made an impression and I had
forgotten that there were black men. I was paralyzed with fear, thinking
I saw Croqueminot _en chair et en os_. Marie saved me by teaching me on
the spot to stick out my index and little fingers, doubling over the two
between. This charm against evil helped and comforted me greatly. I
found it useful later when I saw suspicious-looking beggars in Rome.
Only, although the gesture was the same, it was _jettatura_ and not
_faire les cornes_ in Italy, and the charm was more efficacious if
concealed. I was glad my dress had a pocket.
Mama and Marie took us to the Louvre. I was filled with anticipation.
For had I not heard some one say at our _pension_ that she had bought
things there for a song? Why spend Papa's money if just a song would do?
I could sing. Marie had taught me a pretty song about "La Fauvette." I
was willing to sing if I could get a doll's trunk. I'd sing two or three
songs for a pair of gloves with white fur on them. But when I sang "La
Fauvette" they only smiled at me. I asked the saleslady to take me to
the toy counter, as I could sing again for things I wanted. I had to
explain a whole lot to Mama and Marie and the saleslady. I suppose I
cried with disappointment. Then a man in black with a white tie came
along and heard the story. He gave me a red balloon and Mama consoled me
by buying me a blue velvet dress.
A few months before the war I was walking in the Rue Saint-Honoré with
an old American friend who was doing Paris. He was brimming over with
French history. Your part was to mention the name of the place you
showed him. He would do the rest with enthusiasm and a wealth of detail.
"What is that church?" he asked.
"Saint-Roch," I answered.
"Saint-Roch! Saint-Roch! Saint-Roch!" he cried in crescendo. "Of course,
OF COURSE, because this is the Rue Saint-Honoré. The Rue Saint-Honoré!"
Beside himself with excitement, he rushed across the street, and up on
the steps. I followed, mystified. My friend was waving his cane when I
reached his side. "It was here," he announced, as if he had made a
wonderful discovery, "right on this spot."
"In Heaven's name what?" I queried.
"The beginning of the most glorious epoch of French history, the birth
of the Napoleonic era."
And then he told me the story of how young Bonaparte, called upon to
prevent a mob from rushing the Tuileries, put his guns on the steps of
Saint-Roch, swept the street in both directions, and demonstrated that
he was the first man since '89 who could dominate a Parisian crowd. "You
wouldn't have thought there was anything interesting about this old
church, would you?" he ended triumphantly.
My eyes filled with tears, and my lips trembled. It was his turn to be
mystified, and mine to lead. I took him inside the church, and back to
the chapel of Saint Joseph. "Here," I said, "on Christmas Eve I came
with my father when I was five years old. It was the first time I
remember seeing the Nativity pictured. Good old Joseph looked down on
the interior of the inn. The three wise men were there with the gifts.
Le petit Jésus was in a real cradle, and I counted the jewels around the
Mother's neck. My father tried to explain to me what Christmas means. He
died when I was a little girl. I brought my firstborn here on Christmas
Eve and the others as they came along. I never knew about Napoleon's
connection with Saint-Roch before. And you asked me whether I would have
thought there was anything interesting about this old church!"
The same place can mean so many different things to so many different
people. Paris was Babylon to my grandfather who never went there. And to
those who go there Paris gives what they seek, historical
reminiscences, esthetic pleasure, intellectual profit, inspiration to
paint or sing or play, a surfeit of the mundane, a diminution or an
increase of the sense of nationality, pretty clothes and hats and
perfumes, "rattling" good food and drink or a "howling" good time. You
can be bored in Paris just as quickly and as completely as in any other
place in the world. You can fill your life full of interesting and
engrossing pursuits more quickly and completely than in any other place
in the world. Best of all you make your home in Paris, with no sense of
exile, and enjoy what Paris alone offers in material and spiritual
values without being abnormal or living abnormally.
My childhood vistas seem fragmentary when I put them down on paper. But
they have meant so much to me that I could choose for my children no
greater blessing than to know Paris as home at the beginning of their
lives.
1899