REPOS HEBDOMADAIRE
In Philadelphia you still find shutters with the rings at the middle of
their closing edge. To one of the rings is tied a piece of tape. In my
grandfather's house of a Sunday the shutters were together almost to the
touching point and held that way by the tape tied to the other ring. A
vertical bar of sunshine filtered through the slit. The parlor was cool
and quiet. Nothing moved. My father told me that when he was a little
boy he had to sit at one of those windows all Sunday afternoon
memorizing passages from the Bible. I wonder if in America there are
still many families who install in their children a repugnance for the
Scriptures by this sort of torture, whose observance of Sunday is
reached by a process of elimination of everything a normal person would
instinctively choose to do on a day of rest, and where there are more
don'ts for the children on Sunday than on Monday. Sunday seems to me a
happier day in America now than it was twenty-five years ago. But for
all that we do not enjoy it the way the French do. Until I lived in
France I never knew the full meaning of what I was singing in the hymn,
"O day of rest and gladness."
The French dress up for Sunday as we do. I suppose as large a proportion
of the Parisians go to church as of Americans in any large city. But
once mass is over the day is given to recreation--and recreation out of
doors. What is more depressing than an English or American city on
Sunday? Sunday in Paris is the most animated day of the week. The French
word _endimanché_ is translated in dictionaries "in Sunday best." It has
a wider connotation. A place as well as a person can be _endimanché_.
The word brings up to the mind of one who has lived in Paris crowds,
laughter, fun, open air. How different from sitting on a chair in a room
with bowed shutters when common sense would dictate getting your lungs
filled with fresh air and worshipping God in communion with nature!
In the Rue Servandoni days we came to know the joy and benefit of the
Continental Sunday. And ever since we have brought up our children to
look forward to Sunday as the best day of the week, the out-of-doors
day, when the family could be together from morning to night.
The great thing about Sunday in Paris is that fathers and mothers and
children go out together, all bound for the same place, and stick
together. The family includes grandfathers and grandmothers, who are
always given the best places in the train, the choicest morsels to eat
and who to the day of their death are the adored center of the family
party. Mother carries the _filet_, a big net with handles filled with
good things to eat, and the baby too small to navigate alone is held in
father's strong arms. You can tell little sisters--and even big
ones--for they are dressed alike. Trams and trains for Versailles, the
Bois de Bologne, Saint-Germain-en-Laye and a dozen other equally
attractive suburbs are not taken by assault. The family waits in line at
the tram station, young and old clutching the precious little tickets
that tell them when it is their turn to get places. Everybody has his
chance, and there is no need to worry about grandmother or the baby.
Trams are not overcrowded: there are seats for all. If there is not the
money to go far from home, or if the weather is too threatening, each
quarter has its park, the Luxembourg, Montsouris, Monceau,
Buttes-Chaumont, Jardin des Plants, Vincennes, or the simple _squares_.
For two cents you have the right to sit on chairs near the band-stand.
First come, first served. The only restriction here is that
baby-carriages must stay outside of the enclosure for music-lovers. In
the baby-carriage zone, nobody minds if a baby howls: you may be in the
same condition at the next minute.
Merry-go-rounds, Punch and Judy, swings and donkey-carts are everywhere
to be found for the children. At four o'clock the woman with fresh rolls
goes by. Hot _gauffrette_ and hokey-pokey venders are always near at
hand. If you do not want hokey-pokey, there is _coco_ to drink. The
innocent Sunday fun is not "the kind of thing no-one would think of
doing." Once I was waiting for the wife of a professor of the Ecole de
Guerre, who was later a brilliant general on the Marne. It was Sunday
afternoon. She excused herself for being late. "I stopped in the square
to listen to the band, and I had to have some _coco_. I never can pass a
_coco_ cart," she explained. More than once have I seen a mother,
elegantly dressed, come hurrying to the garden, sit down on a bench, and
nurse a baby handed to her by a nurse in cap and ribbons. I have done
that myself. Is there anything shocking about this? It is the natural
out-of-doors instinct. Distinguished looking gentlemen wearing rosettes
of the Legion of Honor head family excursions. They do not mind pushing
baby-carriages, either.
On a good day the Seine boats are crowded. From Charenton to
Saint-Cloud, there is an endless procession of boats on a Sunday.
Parisians never tire of the spectacle of their city from the river. They
name the bridges as they pass under them and tell their stories to the
children. River clubs abound, and all Paris seems afloat in row-boats
and canoes. From one end of the city to the other the banks of the Seine
are lined with fishermen who seem never to become discouraged. Seine
boating is not without its dangers. But in the Bois de Boulogne the most
inexperienced learn to row and paddle in the shallow water of the lakes.
A miniature railway crosses a corner of the Bois from the Porte Maillot
to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, where kiddies can ride on elephants and
camels or be drawn by ostriches and zebras.
No park is too small to have its ducks and swans with unlimited capacity
for bread-crumbs, its band-stand, its open-air restaurant where drinks
are served and you bring your own food, and its place without grass
where you can stretch your own tennis-net between trees.
The Seine boats, the subway, and many tram lines land you at the foot of
the Eiffel Tower. An elevator quickly takes you above Paris for a view
that was unique before the days of aeroplanes. Near by is the Great
Wheel, always revolving from morning to night on Sundays. Parisians do
not feel the lack of the roofs of skyscrapers when they want to look
down on their city.
For several hundred yards around the fortifications of Paris the law
forbids the erection of permanent buildings: at least, if you do build
in stone and mortar, you risk having your house destroyed, as many found
to their cost in 1914. This enormous land surface, between the city and
suburbs is covered with wooden shacks of rag-pickers and junk-dealers.
Everyone seems to have a very small holding, as the ground is of little
value either for residential or manufacturing purposes. Here thousands
of Parisians own cabins and have miniature vegetable gardens, which they
cultivate on Sunday, dreaming of the day when there will be enough
money in the bank to retire permanently to some quiet country spot. They
come home with arms filled with vegetables and flowers.
In the year at the Rue Servandoni Herbert and I started to explore on
Sundays the _banlieue_ of Paris. Despite increasing "encumbrances" of
different ages, we have managed to keep up our delightful excursions
from early spring to chestnut time, and often on winter Sundays. But we
do not pretend to have exhausted in ten years the possibilities of
Sunday afternoons. We are always discovering new excursions for the
_repos hebdomadaire_.