BEAUTY AS USUAL
Before the war there were few European peoples of whom we knew less,
whom we misunderstood as thoroughly, as the French. We had a French
tradition in the United States once, but that was long ago. New
Orleans, St. Louis, and Charleston, South Carolina, were to a certain
extent French cities up to the time of the Civil War. Old family names,
the names of streets and squares, even a few monuments bear witness
to this. But even in New Orleans the French tradition is now only a
shadow. We have had little immigration from France in late years. Hence
we know little of the people. There was a vague theory that they were
frivolous, pleasure-loving and rather lax in their morals.
The French are not frivolous--they are volatile and gay. They are not
pleasure-loving, any more than other peoples are. The questionable
pleasures of Paris, the bal masques and the Moulin Rouge sort of thing,
existed for tourists mainly. We thought the French liked that kind of
unwholesome painted stuff because it was there, and they thought we
liked it because we paid almost anything to get it. It is time the two
people, French and Americans, understood each other.
I think I can not convey a better idea of the French character, its
unquestionable gaiety and indomitable courage, than by telling how
through all risks and dangers and calamities, their worship of pure
beauty persists. Beauty is a cult with the French. They can not endure
anything ugly. Every national emotion is expressed in terms of beauty
and grace.
Paris, as we know, has been under bombardment from the German
long-distance guns since March twenty-third. Almost every day the
gun has sounded. Some days its spiteful boom sounded every fifteen
minutes from dawn until dark. Now one of the effects of this constant
bombardment was that it threatened to break all the expensive
plate-glass windows in the capital, and the people were advised to
paste strips of paper across their windows. Window glass just now is
not only expensive, but it is very scarce. Once broken, replacement
becomes a serious matter.
Of course, strips of paper can not stop a shell or a piece of shrapnel,
but they can lessen the shock of concussion. So Paris overnight
blossomed from one end to the other with paper-stripped window glass.
But did they just paste on strips of paper, as almost any other people
in the world would have done? They did not. They invented a new art of
window decoration. Every merchant, every householder, vied with all the
others to make their striped-up windows things of beauty. They devised
color schemes, they studied historic design, they made the paper
strips advertise wares. In a word, bombs might fall, but beauty went on
as usual.
But the most extraordinary manifestation of the unquenchable spirit
of the French was the discussion, immediately opened, as to what a
properly self-respecting woman, awakened in the night by death-dealing
bombs from the sky, ought to wear when she fled to the cellar.
A leading Paris newspaper featured an interview with a well-known
dressmaker in which the subject was thoroughly threshed out. The
dressmaker recalled the fact that during the Reign of Terror of the
French revolution the doomed aristocrats dressed for the guillotine as
for a function, this being their last defiance of the mob. Hence it was
but proper that their descendants, the French women of to-day, should
not permit the German terror to interfere with their duty to look well
on all occasions.
This _couturière_ did not have to urge this duty on her clients. They
overwhelmed her, she declared, with demands. It had become for them
necessary to make frequent descents to the bowels of the earth, and
that suddenly. What were they to put on? Nothing in their wardrobe
seemed either suitable or practical.
Thus pressed, madame proceeded to invent a cellar gown. It sounds
funny, but, after all, it may not be. Remember that the Parisians often
had to leave their houses and walk or run half a block or so to find
adequate shelter from aerial bombs. Hence a warm garment was called
for. A woman is not necessarily robed for the street and for a damp
cellar, twenty feet underground, when she throws a kimono over her
nightgown. No!
“It was no small problem, you can readily understand,” declared madame.
“I was obliged to invent a gown that one could put on quickly, at the
first sound of the _alerte_. After much thought I decided on a domino
model. By its simplicity and the amplitude of its dimensions, it is
well suited to a rapid adjustment and a quick flight. It is provided
with an ample hood to cover the hair and to guard against cold draughts.
“The traditional domino, however, is not provided with any pockets.
These, of course, are very necessary in present conditions, since a
number of indispensable objects accompany, or should accompany, a lady
to a cave. She wishes to take with her not only the most precious of
her jewels and _bijoux_, but her purse, watch, keys, mirror, also
divers other small objects; an electric torch, manicuring tools, a box
of powder, a lip stick, perhaps.
“She will require a pencil and a pad of paper, in case she wishes
to keep a diary of events. She may wish to carry with her certain
photographs which she can not bear to lose. Certainly she will need
some morsels of chocolate, and in case the raid is a prolonged one,
something to read. My bombardment robe contains pockets enough and
ample for all emergency requirements.”
The color of the bombardment robe, or cellar gown, was an important
item. The average cave _abri_ or cellar is not noted for its
spotlessness. One must look out for that. Hence the proper color of
the gown was something practical--brown, gray or taupe. However, the
inventor of the gown found no ordinary color exactly to her mind.
She did not wish one of her clients, in the semi-obscurity of a cave,
to be mistaken for a sack of potatoes, nor yet to be trodden on by an
excited new arrival. She sought a color which should be neutral and yet
outstanding, and she found it in a tint she called “_chaudron_,” the
identification of which I shall have to leave to the experts.
It must be a very nice color, however. If you should have to hide in
a coal cellar, it was said, the contact with the coal will not injure
your appearance, but will paint your cellar gown with lovely Rembrandt
effects. Moreover, the hood of this _robe au chaudron_ is lined with
some soft, tender color, which will lend beauty to the countenance
of the wearer, and presumably make the cold and discomfort easier to
endure.
I never descended to the caves during the air raid, preferring to take
my chances on a lower floor. But if I did feel constrained to seek a
wine cave, or a coal cellar while boche bombs were hurtling through the
atmosphere, I admit I might like to wear something becoming. Anyhow, as
long as the French go on making their lives beautiful in spite of air
raids and guns that shoot seventy miles, in spite of devastating German
hordes in the north and a war that shows small signs of abating, I
think they prove themselves bad to beat, and allies we ought to be
proud to claim.
Another thing I admired in the French was their constant sense of
humor. They laughed at the Germans. The big gun, full of hate as it
was, furnished a subject of jest.
The cartoonist drew caricatures of it that were full of wit. When
one of the guns burst, killing, as it must have, a number of German
gunners, a cartoonist pictured the inventor pointing to a miscellaneous
collection of arms and legs which decorated the landscape, saying
proudly: “You see, super-colonel, how kolossaly powerful my kanon is.
It is as deadly at one end as it is at the other!” The Parisians found
this irresistibly comic.
They laughed scornfully at the solemn lies published in the German
papers regarding the alleged panic their bombardment was creating. I
have seen men and women sitting outside the cafés in the Rue Royale and
on the boulevards, sipping their _apéritifs_ before dinner and enjoying
these exaggerations, as reprinted in the Paris papers.
They smiled and chuckled over the news announced in the Stuttgart
_Neues Tageblatt_ that Paris would soon be a mass of ruins; that even
the working class population no longer had the hardihood to remain.
The roads leading to Tours, Orleans, Lyons, cities of the south, were
crowded with interminable convoys, vehicles drawn by horses, donkeys
and even dogs. Sick women were being transported in baby carriages.
The forest of Fontainbleau was one vast camp of refugees.
“Listen then to this, _mon vieux_,” reads a highly diverted Frenchman
to his neighbor at the next table. “It is not only from fear of the
Germans that the entire population is in flight, but it is from fear of
the French themselves. The capital is filled with deserting soldiers
and other disaffected persons who wait only a favorable opportunity to
overthrow the government. Do you hear? The _Berliner Tageblatt_ says
so.”
Funniest of all to the Parisians were the tales of how the whole of
Paris not fleeing to the south was living day and night underground,
and how not only people but all public monuments were being sent to the
caves.
A cartoon in _Le Matin_, I think it was, represented a Frenchman
remarking to a friend that the fog was so thick yesterday that he
couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. “Oh, haven’t you heard?” exclaims the
other, “Clemenceau has hidden it in the Metro.”
I write this also to give the American people an idea of the fantastic
“news” with which the Germans feed their people and keep alive in
them the hope that they can ultimately win this war. Some of these
German dispatches appear in our own newspapers, exaggerated accounts
of victories, absurd estimates of damage inflicted by bombardments. We
should laugh at them as the French do.
The Germans tell their hungry populations that terror is winning the
war, that the French civil population is in flight and that the
government is tottering. It is ridiculously untrue. Many people have
left Paris, just as our people would seek refuge from a like situation.
All the people who have summer homes have gone to them earlier than
usual. There is a systematic movement to take as many children as
possible outside the danger zone. Delicate women and invalids have
generally gone. That is all.