CHAPTER IV
THE PROMISE FULFILLED

"IT was alcohol! He was right, that old buck. It was alcohol!"

We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hotel Terminus in Marseilles. Our month-old baby was lying on the cushioned seat between us. The maÎtre d'hÔtel told us she was the youngest lady that had ever come to his establishment. Bowls of coffee were before us on the table, and we were enjoying our French breakfast when Herbert burst out with the remark I have just recorded.

"What is the matter with you?" I asked.

Shaking with laughter, he told me the story.

"You know the basket with breakables in it? And those two champagne bottles Major Doughty-Wylie gave us?"

"One of them had boracic acid in it. Well?"

"Yes, yes, that is just it. The customshouse officer spied the bottles and it did not take him long to uncork one and smell it. He wanted to stick me for duty."

"What did you do?"

"Protested against paying duty on boracic acid solution. I pointed you out to him sitting over there with the baby. He yielded finally—observing that Americans are queer, tough customers, and that their babies must be husky if their eyes can stand such stuff. But he got the wrong bottle. Don't you remember that in the second one is pure grape alcohol, and that is what he sniffed."

Traveling with a baby, when tickets do not allow one to take the rapide sleeping-cars, has its good points. People do not care to spend the night in a compartment with a baby. We got to the train early—very early. We put Christine's wicker basket (her bed) by the door, and found it to be the best kind of a "reserved" sign. Half a hundred travelers poked their heads in—and passed on. The sight of Christine acted like magic to our advantage. The baby started to cry. "Don't feed her yet," ordered her dad. "Until this train starts, the louder she cries the better for her later comfort." As the wheels began to move, a man came in, put his bag on the rack and sat down. Laughing, he closed the door and pulled down the curtain.

"I have been watching you," said he. "Yours is a clever game. I have three little cabbages myself, and I know babies don't disturb people as much as those who have none think. No," he added, "I must correct myself, thinking of my mother and my mother-in-law. Even those who have had many babies forget in the course of time how they were once used to them. We'll have a comfortable night. Have a cigar, monsieur!"

We did have a splendid sleep. Christine has always been one of those wonder babies. So we were ready to see Paris cheerfully. Heaven knows we needed every possible help to being cheerful! For we were embarked upon a venture that looked more serious than it had the year before. A pair of youngsters can knock around happily without worrying about uncertainties. A baby means a home—and certain unavoidable expenses. Where your progeny is concerned, you can't just do without. We had two hundred and fifty francs in cash, and the prospect of a six hundred dollar fellowship, payable in quarterly installments. That was all we could count upon. Our only other asset was some correspondence sent to the New York Herald that had not been ordered, but for which we hoped to be paid.

The Marseilles express used to arrive at Paris at an outlandish hour. It was not yet six when we were ready to leave the Gare de Lyon. Two porters, laden down with hand-luggage, asked where we wanted to go. We did not know. The Paris hotels that had been our habitats in days past were no longer possible, even temporarily. There was no mother to foot my bills, and Herbert wasn't a bachelor with only his own room and food to pay for. I suggested the possibility of a small hotel by the station. The porters took us out on the Boulevard Diderot. Across the street was a hotel (whose gilt letters, however, did not omit the invariable adjective "grand") that looked within our means.

Once settled and breakfasted, the family council tackled the first problem—Scrappie, gurgling on the big bed. Ever since she was born we had been traveling, and she naturally had to be with us all the time. Only now, after five weeks of parenthood, did the novel and amazing fact dawn upon us that no longer could we "just go out." Scrappie was to be considered. Without Scrappie, we could have set forth immediately upon our search for a place to live. With Scrappie—?

There always is a deus ex machina. In our case it was a dea. Marie still lived in Paris. The contact had never been lost, and when we went through Paris on our honeymoon the year before, I had taken my husband to show him off to Marie. It was decided that I should go out immediately and find her. A month before we had written that we were coming to Paris in June, and she would be expecting us. Marie, and Marie alone, meant freedom of movement. I could not think of trusting my baby to anyone else.

The address was at the tip of my tongue—22 Rue de Wattignies. A few people know vaguely of the battle, but how many life-long Parisians know the street? Not the boulevardiers or the faubouriens of Saint-Germain, or the Americans, North and South, of the Etoile Quarter. And yet the Rue de Wattignies is an artery of importance, copiously inhabited. We had gone in a cab last year, and remembered that it was somewhere beyond the Bastille. At the corner of the street beyond our hotel, just opposite the great clock tower of the Gare de Lyon, I saw the Bastille column not far away. Why waste money on cabs? To the right of the Bastille lay the Rue de Wattignies, and not very far to the right. I remembered perfectly, and started out unhesitatingly.

Oh, the Paris vistas! No other city in the world has every hill top, every great open space, marked by a building or monument that beckons to you at the end of boulevard or avenue. No other city in the world has familiar dome or tower or steeple popping up over housetops in the distance to reassure you wherever you may have wandered, that you are not far from, and that you can always find your way to, a familiar spot. The Eiffel Tower, the Great Wheel, the Arc de Triomphe, SacrÉ Coeur, the PanthÉon, Val-de-GrÂce, the Invalides, the Tour St. Jacques, give you your direction. But when you dip into Paris streets, on your way to the goal, you are lost. Even constant reference to a map and long experience do not save you from the deceptive encouragement of Paris vistas. You can walk in circles almost interminably.

I had done this so often in the old days when I escaped from my governess. I did so again when I tried to find the Rue de Wattignies. Perhaps I did not try very hard: for one never minds wandering in Paris. The life of the streets is a witchery that makes one forgot time and distance and goal. When I lost sight of the Bastille column, the labyrinth of St. Antoine streets led me on until I had crossed the canal and found myself by the HÔpital St. Louis. After the year in the East, and years before that in America, old houses and street markets held me in a new world. It was a glorious June day to boot, and after steamer and train, walking was a keen pleasure. Marital and parental responsibilities were forgotten. The HÔpital St. Louis brought me back to the realities of life. I knew that it was north of the Bastille, and not in the direction of the Rue de Wattignies. Suddenly there came uneasily into my mind the picture of a husband, a prisoner, patiently waiting in a very small room in a very small hotel, and a baby demanding lunch. Conscience insisted upon a cab: for nearly two hours had passed since I started forth to find Marie. I had left the hotel early enough to catch her before she might have gone out. What if Marie should not be at home? "Hurry, cocher!"

My panic was unjustified. Marie was at home. Delighted to hear of our arrival, and eager to see her petite HÉlÈne's baby, she put on her funny little black hat, and went right down to the waiting cab.

When we got to the hotel, Herbert was eating a second mid-morning petit dÉjeuner. He had a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald, and showed me, well played up in a prominent place, the last of the Adana massacre stories he had forwarded by mail from Turkey. This was the first time he realized that his "stuff" had been exclusive. There was a pleasant prospect of drawing a little money. So my long absence brought forth no remark, specially as Scrappie had slept like an angel.

"We played a wise game," said Herbert, "when we sent the stories smuggled through Cyprus to the Herald. We shall not have to correspond with New York on a slim chance of a newspaper's gratitude. We can get at James Gordon Bennet right here in Paris." Then he showed me some advertisements picked out in the column of pensions as promising and within our means. We had decided to consider nothing outside of the Latin Quarter.

Marie had not changed a bit. She could not say the same for me although she fussed over me as if I were five going on six. She forgot that twenty years had gone since the last time she combed my hair. She communicated to me the old sense of security. She bathed the baby. She brought me food and sat beside me, observing that long ago she had to coax me to take one more mouthful to please her.

"You always were fussy about your food. Ma chÈre petite HÉlÈne, you don't eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. You are a naughty one."

She insisted upon my drinking a cup of camomile tea, and took me straight back to my sixth year by calling it pipi du chat. Knowing that name for camomile tea is one of the tests of whether one really knows French.

"Marie," I begged, "show me how English people speak French—the way you used to do!"

But Herbert, who had gone out to get the Daily Mail for its pension list, was coming in the door, and Marie would not show off before Monsieur. Never did she call me chÈre petite HÉlÈne when he or any other person was present. It was always Madame before company. The Mail had many advertisements of pensions in streets near the Luxembourg. Marie helped us pick them out. The Luxembourg Garden was an integral part of the Latin Quarter, and we had to think of Scrappie's outing.

After lunch we turned Christine over thankfully to Marie and went out pension-hunting together.

"You were lucky in finding Marie," was all Herbert said.

"Yes," I answered, "I really couldn't have left the baby with anyone else."

"But is Marie the only person in the world? Without her, would you be a slave for ever and ever? There must be plenty of people that we could get to look after Scrappie."

"You don't know what it means to have a child!" said Scrappie's mother.

"I guess I look pretty healthy for a fellow who has just landed in Paris with a wife and a baby and 250 francs!" said my husband.

"Can't make us mad," said I; "we're in Paris."

You pile up on one side of the scale heaps of things that ought to worry you, but if you put on the other side the fact that you are in Paris, down goes the Paris side with a sure and cheerful bang, up goes the other side, and the worries tumble off every which way into nowhere.

The main threads of the world's spider web start very far from Paris in all directions and the heaviest urge of traffic is towards the centre. Paris was the centre of the spider web long before Peace Delegates came here to discover the fact. Students, diplomats, travel-agencies, theatrical troupes knew it and whole shelves of books have been written, down the years, to prove it. If Paris is your birth-place, you learn that you are in the capital of the world long before you know how to read the books. If you are an expert on ancient coins, if you are a wood-carver, if you are a singer wanting a voice that will make your fortune because it was trained in France, if you are a baker, if you are a burglar, if you are a silk merchant, if you are a professor from Aberdeen hunting for manuscripts that will prove your thesis concerning Pelagius, if you are an apache, if you are an English nursemaid,—you'll never be lonely in Paris. No matter how isolated or queer or misunderstood you were where you came from, in Paris you'll find inspiration, competition, companionship, opportunity and pals. The papers tell us every week that the birth rate is going down. But the population of Paris is increasing. So in peace, in war and in peace again, there was one constant quantity underpinning existence—Paris, the centre of the spider web. The spider that lures is liberty to work out one's ideas in one's own way in a friendly country. It is a wonder the men who make maps in France can draw lines latitudinally and longitudinally. What difference did it make then if we had only two hundred and fifty francs?

CHAPTER V
THE PENSION IN THE RUE MADAME

WE started our search for a temporary home at the Observatoire, and good fortune took our footsteps down the Rue d'Assas rather than down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Had we turned to the right instead of to the left, we should probably have found a pension that satisfied our requirements on the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Rue Claude Bernard, the Rue Soufflot, or behind the PanthÉon. But a short distance down the Rue d'Assas, we turned into the Rue Madame, which held two possibilities on our list. The first place advertised proved to be a private apartment, whose mistress was looking for boarders for one room who would not only pay her rent but her food and her old father's as well. We got out quickly, and kept our hopes up for the second place. It was a small private hotel just below the Rue de Vaugirard, with a modest sign: Pension de Famille.

A beaming young woman, who told us that she was Mademoiselle GuyÉnot, propriÉtaire et directrice de la maison, answered our first question in a way that won our hearts forever. "Do I mind a baby!" she exclaimed. "I love them. No trouble in the world. Wish the bon dieu would allow me to have one myself. If any boarder complains about babies crying in my house, I ask them how they expect the world to keep on going. Parfait! Bring the little rabbit right along. Of course there is no charge. Is it I who will feed her? Think of it, then!" And Mademoiselle GuyÉnot opened wide her arms and lifted them Heavenward. Her eyes shone, and she laughed.

We engaged a room on the court, two flights up, for seventy francs a week tout compris, lodging, food, boots, wine. Lights would not amount to more than a franc a week. We could give what we wanted for attendance. The arrangement with Marie was perfect. She would stay at home and come for the days we wanted her. That meant only her noonday meal on our pension bill—one franc-fifty.

We got out of the Boulevard Diderot hotel none too soon. The charges were fully as much as at a first-class hotel (I have frequently since found this to be the case in trying to economize in travel) and made a serious dent in our nest-egg. When we reached the pension with our baby and baggage, we felt that it was only the square thing to acquaint the new friend who loved babies with our financial situation.

"Oh! la, la," cried Mademoiselle GuyÉnot, "you may pay me when you like!"

"You must understand," said my husband, "that we have just come out of Turkey and have very little money. Of course, as soon as we get settled, things will be all right again."

Mademoiselle received us in the bureau of her pension with open arms and lightning French. I could not get it all, but we knew she was glad to see us. She turned around on her chair and faced us as we sat on an old stuffed sofa surrounded by our suitcases.

"You must not worry," she exclaimed, "you must not worry du tout, du tout, du tout, du tout.... If you don't pay me I'll keep the baby, pauvre chou."

Mademoiselle's voice went up the scale and down again, dying away only when she opened her mouth wider to laugh.

Mademoiselle ran the pension single-handed in those days. Now she is Madame and the mother of two little girls. Monsieur is a mechanical genius and has himself installed many conveniences. He can paper a room, rig up a table lamp at the head of a bed, carry in the coal, forage for provisions with a hand-cart and a cheerful jusqu'au boutisme that stops at nothing. He is also able to make a quick change in clothes and bobs up serenely within fifteen minutes after unloading the potatoes, quite ready to make you a cocktail.

Mademoiselle handled her clients with cheerful firmness. She used to marshal the forces of her house with a strong and capable hand. You could not put one over on her then any more than you can now, as some transients discovered to their confusion. The regulars knew better than to try. On the other hand if your case was good and your complaint justified, she defended you with energy. LibertÉ, ÉgalitÉ, fraternitÉ were realities in the Rue Madame.

The clientele was French for the most part: elderly people who had got tired of keeping house. Folks from the provinces who had come to town to spend the winter after Monsieur retired from business. Young people, mostly men, some of them long haired who were studying at the Sorbonne or elsewhere. And a sprinkling of transients whose chief effect upon the regulars was allowing them to shift about until they had possession of the rooms they wanted to keep at a monthly rate. When we went to the pension we were the only Americans. We paid five francs a day for room and board like everybody else excepting the old lady who had come to the house years ago when the rate was four francs fifty. German Hausfraus may be marvels in management, but I defy any lady Boche to beat Mademoiselle's efficiency. She got all the work of kitchen and dining-room done, and well done too, by Victorine the tireless, Louis the juggler and FranÇois the obsequious. Guillaume and Yvonne, a working menage, looked after the rooms until they got a swell job at the Ritz Hotel, where tips would count. The other three were fixtures.

In spirit the Rue Madame pension has not changed. The atmosphere to-day is as it was in nineteen hundred and nine. The table is good, plentiful, appetizing—and, oh, what a variety of meats and vegetables! The potatoes are never served in the same way twice in a week, and Madame Primel, as Mademoiselle is now called, cooks as many different plats de jour as her number in the street, which is forty-four. There the reader has my secret! But five francs a day no longer holds. In nineteen hundred and nineteen five francs will barely pay for a single meal. Not only has the price of food more than doubled, but the traveler is beginning to demand comforts that cost. We used to have buckets of coal brought up, and make a cheerful fire. We used to grope in the dark when we came home, strike a match, and look for our candle on the hall table. We used to have a lamp—the best light in the world—in our room. But now the pension in the Rue Madame has yielded to the demands of a discontented world. Steam heat, electric lights—these have had their part in making five francs a day disappear forever. The five franc pension exists only in the memory of Paris lovers, or in story books like mine.

At our table were Mrs. Reilly, a sprightly Irish woman called by the pensionnaires Madame Reely; Monsieur Mazeron, a law student with an ascetic blond face and hair like a duckling; an elderly couple from Normandy who had adopted Madame Reely, swallowed her at one gulp of perfection, only to discover afterwards that they did not understand her; a Polish doctor and his wife from Warsaw; and others. Madame Reely made a pretty speech the first night at dinner, proposing that our table volunteer to help us take care of the baby.

"To-morrow is the FÊte Dieu," said she. "I'll go to the early mass so that I can come back and stay with the baby while you two go to the later mass. You will see the priests in their robes of ceremony, the Holy Relics, and a thousand children in the procession. It is too lovely,—all those little things with their baskets of flowers, throwing petals in the path of the priests. Who can tell," she went on in a whispered aside to her neighbor, "it may impress them. One never knows when new converts are to be added to the blessed Church!"

"And I shall look at the baby," said the Doctor from Warsaw. "Children are my specialty. That is why I am here, observing in the clinics of Paris, you see. I shall come to your room to-morrow after breakfast. Being an American mother, I suppose you give your baby orange juice?"

"Certainly I give her orange juice," said I; "it is good for her."

"Au contraire! au contraire!" cried the Doctor, waving his hands. The Doctor was always "au contraire" no matter what was said and who said it. Polish character.

In a corner was a tiny table for one. It was for the starboarder, a young Roumanian, who wore a purple tie held together by a large amethyst ring. Possibly he wore it because he believed in the ancient legend about amethysts being good to prevent intoxication. When we entered upon the scene he was still in high favor. His downfall came later and had to do with a wide-awake concierge and a luckless kiss at the front door.

The food we had was the kind we used to have in Paris when many visitors came here with no better excuse than to enjoy the cuisine. Mademoiselle gave us two meat dishes for each meal. If you did not like calves' liver, Louis would do a trick that landed a steaming plate of crisp fried eggs (fried in butter, you remember) before you. And that without being told. Behind the scenes was Victorine.

Victorine invited me into her kitchen to learn how to make sauce piquante.

"Are you married, Victorine?" I queried.

"My cookstove is my husband," she laughed; "his heart is good and warm and he never leaves me."

During meals Mademoiselle was to be found in the kitchen. She did the carving herself and tasted everything before it was passed through a window to Louis.

There was no felt covering under the table-cloth. The serving of the meal competed with piping, high-pitched, excited voices. Perhaps I oughtn't to say excited, but the Frenchman in his most ordinary matter of fact conversation sounds excited to the Anglo-Saxon. He asks you to pass the bread in the same tone you would use in announcing an event of moment. At each place was a glass knife-and-fork rest. In France, unless the first dish happens to be fish, you keep the same knife and fork. This is the custom in the best of homes. We are prodigal of cutlery where the French are prodigal of plates. The same knife and fork didn't matter, because the food was so good. Nor does it matter to-day, because now there is only one meat dish. Times have changed.

If fruit or pudding ran out, Mademoiselle opened a section of the wall, finding the key on a bunch that was suspended from her belt on a piece of faded black tape. From the cupboard she took tiny glasses filled with confiture or perhaps a paste made of mashed chestnuts and flour slightly sweetened. The glasses, to the touch, were cylindrical, but when you had broken the paper pasted across the top and had eaten half way down, the space was no wider than the fat part of your tea spoon. If your glass was a cylinder outside, on the inside it was an inverted cone.

The quantities of bread consumed in that house would be appalling to anybody but a Frenchman. A Turk can live on bread and olives. But a Frenchman can live on bread alone. If he had to choose between bread and wine he would forget the wine. When the basket was passed around, the pensionnaires, with a delightful absence of self-consciousness, would cast their eye over it in order to select the biggest piece. There was always one person who would look around the room furtively, take the biggest piece on the plate, slip the second biggest piece into the lap under the serviette, and then, gazing far away in ostrich fashion, glide the bread into pocket or reticule. If the dessert happened to be fruit, an orange or an apple would follow the bread for private consumption later in the day. Perhaps these people came in for luncheon only and the bread and fruit was devoured at twilight at some little cafÉ where it is permitted to customers to bring their own supplies, if they buy a drink. This stretching of luncheon procured the evening meal. If necessity is the mother of invention, the students of Paris are necessity's grandmother.

Louis, the arch-juggler, was forced by public opinion to alternate day by day his point of departure when passing the steaming plat du jour. EgalitÉ, you remember, is one-third of French philosophy. It would never do for the same end of the dining-room to enjoy for two days running the little privilege of having the first pick at the best piece of meat in the plate.

FranÇois helped in the dining-room. But he was everywhere else too. He was useful for Louis to swear at and to blame. He was bell-hop, scullery-boy, errand-man, who needed all of his amazing reserves of cheerfulness. I wondered when FranÇois slept. He was on hand with his grin and his oui, madame, early and late. Once when we slid out of the house at five in the morning to go on an excursion, we found him in the lower hall surrounded by the boots of the house. Back of his ear was a piece of chalk used for marking the number of the room on the soles of the boots. He was polishing away, moving his arm back and forth with a diminutive imitation of the swing his legs had to accomplish when his brush-clad feet were polishing the waxed floors. As a concession to the early hour, he was whistling softly instead of singing. The whistling of FranÇois fascinated everyone because it came through a tongue folded funnel-wise and placed in the aperture where a front tooth was missing. And we would often find him up and about when we came home late at night. It was a pleasant surprise, when, after calling out your name, you made ready to walk back to the candlestick table, hands stretched out before you, to have FranÇois suddenly appear with a light. He would hold out over the table his little hand lamp with the flourish a Gascon alone can make. You picked out your candlestick by the number of your room cut in its shining surface. The number had an old-fashioned swing to its curve, suggesting that the solid bit of brass might have been dug up from the garden of some moss-grown hostelry after a passage of the Huns.

Mademoiselle GuyÉnot insisted that the flagged pavement be washed every day. FranÇois used to fill with water a tin can in the bottom of which he had punched half a dozen holes. He swung it about the court until figure eight shaped sprinkle-tracks lay all over the twelve-by-twenty garden. Afterwards he would take a short-handled broom, bend himself over like a hairpin, and sweep up the flag-stones. The dirt he accumulated was made into a neat newspaper package and set aside to wait until early to-morrow morning when it was put out on the street in the garbage-pail. FranÇois' thin high voice sang incessantly and sounded for all the world like the piping of a Kurdish shepherd above the timber line in the Taurus Mountains. In those days woe betide you if you put trash or garbage on a Paris street later than 8 A. M. It was as unseemly an act as shaking carpets out of your window after the regulation hour. Now, even if you are a late and leisurely bank clerk or fashionable milliner and you don't have to show up at work before 10 o'clock, you will see garbage-pails along curb-stones and likely as not get a dust shower furious enough to make you wish you hadn't left your umbrella at home. The old days—will they come back?

When the band plays soft Eliza-crossing-the-ice music, my mind flies to several Home-Sweet-Homes. I think of Tarsus, Constantinople, Oxford and Princeton. But there is no twinge of homesickness. Paris and my present home there satisfy every want and longing. Among the homes of the past, however, I think of others in Paris as well as of those of other places. I never forget the pension in the Rue Madame. Thankfully it is still a reality. During the past decade it has housed our mothers and sisters and cousins and friends. We have gone there to see them. And we go there to see our first warm friend in Paris and her husband and children. From time to time we have a meal in the old dining-room. We hope the pension will not disappear or will not be converted into too grand a hotel. For us it is a Paris landmark.

CHAPTER VI
LARES AND PENATES IN THE RUE SERVANDONI

WE spent the first anniversary of our wedding in Egypt. A week later we arrived in Paris. For prospective residents as well as for tourists, June is the best time of the year to reach Paris. You have good weather and long days, both essentials of successful home-hunting. It is an invariable rule in Paris to divide the year in quarters, beginning with the fifteenth of January, April, July and October. Whether you are looking for a modest logement on a three months' lease or a grand appartement-confort moderne—on a three years' lease, the dates of entry are the same. One rarely breaks in between terms. If you have passed one period, you must wait for the next trimestre. The person who is leaving the apartment you rent might be perfectly willing to accommodate you, but he has to wait to get into his new place. So when we went to the pension, we had before us the best home-hunting weeks of the year, with the expectation of being able to get settled somewhere on July 15th.

At the pension, our room faced on the court, and the personnel, from Mademoiselle GuyÉnot down to Victorine and FranÇois, assured us that we need not feel bound to stay at home on the days Marie could not come to us. Marie for years had been sewing four different days of the week for old patrons, and we did not feel certain enough of our own plans and purse to accept the responsibility of her giving up a sure thing.

"Go out all you want to," urged our friends. "You only have to think about meal times for the baby. Someone is always in the court sewing or sorting the laundry or preparing vegetables. Your window is open. We cannot fail to hear the baby."

But a chorus of bien sÛr and parfaitement and soyez tranquille did not reassure what was as new born as Christine herself—the maternal instinct. A letter from Herbert's father solved the problem. He inclosed the money for a baby carriage. We carried Scrappie down the Boulevard Raspail to the little square in front of the Bon MarchÉ. I kept her on a bench while Herbert went in to follow my directions as well as he could. In a few minutes he came out and said he would rather take care of the baby. It was the first time I had seen him stumped. So I had the joy I had hoped would be mine all along but of which I did not want to deprive my husband, seeing that we could not share it. The reader may ask why we didn't take the baby inside. But it will not be a young mother who puts that question! With one's firstborn, one sees contagion stalking in every place where crowds gather indoors.[B]

The Rue de Vaugirard by the Luxembourg
The Rue de Vaugirard by the Luxembourg

We did not intend to consider a home that was not within baby-carriage distance of the Rue Madame. In fact, after a few days in the Luxembourg Quarter, we were determined to live as near the Garden as possible. There we were within walking distance of the BibliothÈque Nationale and the Sorbonne and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques. Marie, whom the fact that I was my Mother's daughter did not blind to the extent of the Gibbons family resources, urged the Bois de Vincennes. But we would not hear of it.

It is strange how rich and poor rub elbows with each other in their homes. Paris is no different from American cities in this respect. The kind of an apartment we wanted would cost more than our total income, as rents around the Luxembourg for places equipped with electric lights and bathtubs and central heating seemed to be as expensive as around the Etoile. Then in the same street—sometimes next door—you had the other extreme. Our finances pointed to a logement in a workingmen's tenement. Care for Scrappie's health made our hearts sink every time we were shown a place that seemed within our means.

Of course there were reasonable places: for many others who demanded cleanliness had no more money than we. But the Latin and Montparnasse Quarters are the Mecca of slim-pursed foreigners. People foolish enough to study or sing or paint are almost invariably poor. Perhaps that is the reason! We had lots of exercise, and came to know every street between the Luxembourg and the Seine. Our good fortune arrived unexpectedly as good fortune always arrives to those who will not be side-tracked.

Between the Rue Vaugirard and Saint-Sulpice are three tiny streets, the houses on the opposite sides of which almost rub cornices. The Rue FÉrou is opposite the MusÉe de Luxembourg. On the Rue de Vaugirard is the home of Massenet. We used to get a glimpse of him occasionally on his terrasse—a sort of roof-garden with a vine-covered lattice on top of the low Rue FÉrou wing of his house. The other two streets paralleling the Rue FÉrou from the Palais du Luxembourg to the Eglise Saint-Sulpice are the Rue Servandoni and the Rue GaranciÈre.

On the morning of the Fourth of July we had been diving in and out the side streets of the Rue Bonaparte and the Boulevard Saint-Germain. At Scrappie's meal time, we came to a bench in the Square in front of Saint-Sulpice. It wasn't a bit like a holiday. It was sultry and looked like rain. We were wondering whether we had better not hurry back to the pension for fear of getting the baby wet. Just then people began to stop and look up. A huge balloon was above us. And it carried the American flag.

"You can't beat it," said my husband. "And we are Americans. Ergo, you can't beat us!"

Did the sight of the flag do the trick? Anyway, it was our Japanese "last quarter of an hour." We had come down through the Rue FÉrou. We went back for the twentieth time in twenty days through the Rue Servandoni. Grey houses, topped with beehive chimneys, leaned amicably against each other and broke the sky line as well as the municipal rÉglement (made long after they were) concerning the distance between houses on opposite sides of streets. Our hearts nearly stopped beating when we reached Number 21. There was the magic sign (it had not been there yesterday): Appartement À Louer. We stopped short in the middle of the street. The side-walks are not wide enough to walk on, much less wheel a baby-carriage along. The grocer on the ground floor saw us take the bait. Out he came. Did Monsieur and Madame care to see the appartement? If so, he was concierge as well as grocer. He would show us the place. We drew the new baby-carriage into the dark vestibule and went up one easy flight of oak balustraded stairs. The grocer pulled a red-braided bell rope.

A man in shirt-sleeves opened the door. We stepped into a tiny dining-room where the gas was lit although it was noon. The wall-paper was yellow, and had sprawling brown figures like beetles. A dark passage led into an immense room with a generous fireplace. Two windows opened on the Rue Servandoni. It was a paper-hanger's shop with ladders, brushes, buckets, rolls and rolls of paper and barrels of flour-paste around. But the fellow in shirt-sleeves assured us that when his fittings were out, we would realize what a handsome room it was. "The dining-room is dark," he admitted, "but you can't match this room for light and size in any two-room apartment in the Quarter. I know them all. I am leaving because I have found a ground floor shop. I'll put new paper on here very cheap."

The locataire assumed that we would take it. So did the grocer-concierge. Without our asking, Monsieur SempÉ told us that the rent would be one hundred and fifty francs a quarter. We did not have to make a troublesome lease, just a little agreement involving three months' notification on either side.

"Don't forget," said SempÉ, "that this old house sits between two modern apartment buildings. The walls are warm. Your neighbors have steam heat."

"True," confirmed the paper-hanger. But he did not want us to think that we could be altogether vicariously heated. "Possibly you may not have noticed," he added, "the fireplace in the dining-room. It heats almost as well as this one. I'll sell you my grates. Boulets make the best fire."

The thrill of admiration I had for my husband's magnificent courage when he signed the paper, and paid out fifty of his last hundred francs "on account" is with me still.

"We are sure to be able to pay our rent," said he, as we went back to the pension. "We couldn't expect to get anything for less than ten dollars a month. The first installment of the fellowship money will come next week, and before then I shall certainly get something out of the Herald. It will have to be enough to buy our furniture."

It never rains but it pours. At the pension we found a letter from Mr. James Gordon Bennett, asking Herbert to call that afternoon at three o'clock at 104 Avenue des Champs-ElysÉes. It was in a blue envelope with a little owl embossed on the flap, and was signed "J. G. BENNETT" in blue pencil almost the color of the paper. How often we were to see this envelope and this signature, and what luck it was going to bring us! We thought the occasion demanded a celebration. I did Scrappie and myself up in our best, and we set forth for the Champs-ElysÉes in an open fiacre—our first ride since we came from the Boulevard Diderot to the Rue Madame. We waited in the carriage while Herbert went in to collect his money for the Adana massacre stories.

I watched the door of the big apartment house anxiously. Our furniture and the rest of the rent for the apartment depended upon the success of the visit. Half an hour later Herbert's face told me that all was well. He had sent in a bill of four hundred dollars, and fifty dollars expenses. Mr. Bennett, he told me, began by scolding him for not making it in francs, and then gave him a check for twenty-five hundred francs, which more than covered what Herbert asked for. The Commodore then offered Herbert a position at five hundred francs a week, and was surprised when it was declined. He seemed much amused when Herbert explained that he had come to Paris to study. "But you will go on special trips in an emergency," said Mr. Bennett. It is enough to say that the "emergencies" occurred often enough to tide over many a financial difficulty during years that followed.

Provided with funds after passing by the bank, we took Christine to Rumpelmayer's to tea, and then drove back the Rue Servandoni to pay the rest of our rent. When Monsieur SempÉ gave us the quittance, he admonished us that we must put enough furniture in the apartment to cover six months' rent, that is to say, we must be prepared to spend at least sixty dollars to set up our Lares and Penates. Bubbling over with good will, Monsieur SempÉ and Madame SempÉ (who appeared on the scene the moment it was a question of a receipt for our money) gave us splendid advice about furniture-buying. They urged us to go to the Rue de Rennes to some good-sized place where we would see second-hand furniture on the side-walk, and not to a small brocanteur or dealer in antiques.

The amount ticked up on the fiacre's taximetre was larger than we had dreamed we should ever spend gadding about Paris. A few hours before it would have worried us. We knew this could not keep up—in spite of the crisp hundred franc notes. Wealth brings a strange sense of prudence. We drove back to the pension, dismissed our cocher, and pushed the baby-carriage around to the Rue de Rennes.

MOBILIERS COMPLETS PAR MILLIERS. "Household furniture sets by the thousand." That sign read promisingly. We entered, and found a salesman—excuse me, the proprietor and salesman and cashier—who took in my clothes and hat, and then assured us that he did not mind the baby crying and could fit us up in anything from Louis Quatorze to the First Empire, real or (this as a feeler) imitation. Salle À manger from eight hundred francs to four thousand; chambre À coucher from four hundred francs to two thousand six hundred; salon from one thousand francs to six thousand; splendid garnitures (which means clocks and candlesticks or vases) of all epochs for our cheminÉes; hatracks for the hall; kitchen and servants' furniture—all, everything, anything we needed.

I knew what was in Herbert's reproachful look. He always did ungraciously blame my mother for the fact that he had so frequently to counteract my trousseau by embarrassed words. Mostly I let him stumble along. But as this was his day and as I hadn't taken off the pretty things worn in honor of the visit to the Champs-ElysÉes, which was a break on my part, I thought it was up to me to let the furniture man see how things stood.

"We have a little apartment," I said, "bedroom and living-room combined, a very small dining-room and a kitchen. I expect to buy the baby's crib and mattress aside, but the rest must come out of five hundred francs—I mean all of it. What can you give us for that?"

I often think the French are essentially poor salesmen. They do not know how to show their goods and they are too indifferent or too anxious. But the blessed virtue of chivalry! The blessed sense of proportion! The blessed instinct of moderation! Our furniture man rose to the occasion with a grace that made me want to hug him. He kept his smile and bow and changed with perfect ease from Louis and Napoleons to pitchpine. It would require figuring. But it could be done. Yes, of course it could be done. Down into the cellar he took us, and in half an hour he had arranged to give us all we needed for Francs 532.70. I remember those figures. And he agreed to take the whole lot back at half-price at the end of a year!

The furniture man bore a striking resemblance to some one I knew. I watched him, and tried to place him, as he made out our bill in the office—seven square feet of glassed-in suffocation surrounded by armoires and buffets. Dust clung to pages and blotters and yellowing files; no air ever came in here to blow it away. Where had I seen the double of our friend? Full forehead, closely-trimmed, pointed beard, soft black tie—and the eyes. Where had I seen him before? Writing with flourishes in purple ink, slightly bending over the high desk, he certainly fitted into some memory picture. Then it came to me! His pen ought to be a quill. It was William Shakespeare.

"Will-yum Shakespeare!" I cried.

My husband did not think I was crazy. For he was looking at the furniture man when I made my involuntary exclamation.

"What does Madame say? Is she not content?" asked William Shakespeare. Herbert's hand shot out behind his back and grasped mine. "Shades of Stratford-on-Avon," he murmured. We had passed a honeymoon day there just a year ago.

It was hard to wait until July 15, and then two days longer for the necessary cleaning by a femme de mÉnage hired for us by the SempÉs. July 17th was the magical day of our first housekeeping. Never before had we been together in a place where everything was ours. Tables and chairs and beds and mattresses, and even the piano rented at ten francs a month, arrived at Twenty-One on hand-carts drawn by men who pulled only a little harder against the greasy harness that bound them to their job than did the dogs under the carts.

Turkish women say that if you must move, abandon the furniture and dishes; they can be had anywhere. But take with you the rugs and brass that you love, and you have your home. During the previous winter in Tarsus, we managed to buy several good rugs, a cradle-shawl, some candlesticks and Damascus beaten-brass trays out of our eight-hundred dollar salary. Don't ask me now how we did it. In retrospect it is a mystery. But we had these things in two big boxes. They were as butter is to bread with our pitch-pine. No, I'm not going to belittle that pitch-pine. Years of usage had modified its yellowness, and it took to our rubbing with a marvelous furniture polish. The floors could have been better. The wood was hard, however, and we got some sort of a wax shine on them. The Shakespeare furniture plus rugs and brasses—and candle light—made a home than which we have never since had better. Never mind if the dining-room was dark. Never mind if we had to sleep in our study, and study in our bedroom. Never mind if Scrappie's nursery was the salon, cabinet de travail and chambre À coucher combined. Never mind if we were compelled to take our baths at the foot of our bed in a tin basin. It was Paris, our dream city.

We were fully installed by six o'clock. The femme de mÉnage volunteered to stay with Christine while we went out for supper. Before finding a restaurant, we climbed the north tower of Saint-Sulpice. Between us and the mass of verdure that marked the Jardin du Luxembourg was our home. Up there near heaven, with the city at our feet, we danced the Merry Widow Waltz, for sheer joy that we had a home of our own in Paris.

CHAPTER VII
GOLD IN THE CHIMNEY

HOW can two young people, with a baby and three hundred dollars in cash, able to count upon a one-year fellowship yielding six hundred dollars, live a year in Paris? The answer to that question is that it cannot be done. But we were not in the position to answer it that way. We were in Paris, and we had the baby. Pride and ambition are factors that refuse to be overruled by the remorseless logic of figures. If you put a proposition down on paper, you can prove that almost anything you want to do is impossible. Successful undertakings are never the result of logical thinking. Herbert and I would not have had a wedding at all if we had thought the matter out and had considered the financial side of life.

Herbert was keeping, however, some prejudices and some prudent reserves, remembering his father's caution that life has a financial basis. Sitting there on the packing-case we had picked out for a coal-box in our study-bedroom, he hauled out an account-book and was fussing over a missing franc. Our first year was one of constant change of scene, and we had not "kept house." Now, declared my husband, was the time to turn over a new leaf. If we knew where and how our money went, financing the proposition would be easier. With tears in my eyes and biting a pencil with trembling lips, I rebelled. I could not get interested in that missing franc.

"I want you to realize now, once for all, that I'm not going to keep this old cash account. I don't believe in worrying about money. I'm not going to worry about money and neither are you. There are only three financial questions: (1) how much money is there? (2) how long is it going to last? (3) what are we going to do when it's all gone? Two follows one, and three follows two—one, two, three—just like that!"

I was laughing now, and raised three fingers successively under my boss's nose.

"As long as we are in one, we are not in two; and when we are in two, we have not reached three. Let us wait for three until we are in three, or at least until we know we are about to leave two."

After paying a quarter's rent, the bill for the furniture and cleaning up sundry little expenses, we had left fifteen hundred francs of the Gordon Bennett capital. A thousand francs was deposited with Morgan, Harjes and Company. The other five hundred, in twenty-franc gold-pieces, the bank gave us in a shiny little pink pasteboard box. Our chimney had a big hole in the plaster. The wall paper was torn but intact. An ideal hiding-place. I put the box in the hole and smoothed down the paper.

"This hole is our bank," I announced. "We shall keep no account, and you and I will take the gold boys when we need them."

Herbert saw a great light. From that moment to this day we have been free from a useless drudgery and have been able to conserve our energy for our work. Herbert said, "Agreed! And when the pile gets low, I'll be like the little boy the old man saw digging."

"What was the little boy digging for?" I chuckled.

"Ground-hogs," answered my husband. "An old man came along and told him he would never catch a gopher like that, for they could dig quicker than folks. 'Can't get him?' said the boy. 'Got to get him, the family's out of meat.'"

Now that the financial credo of the home-makers in the Rue Servandoni is set forth, I shall not have to talk any more about how we got our money and how much there was of it. But I had to take my readers into my confidence, for I did not want them to labor under the misapprehension that persisted among our neighbors of the Rue Servandoni throughout our year there. They took it for granted that les petits amÉricains were living at Twenty-One because that sort of fun appealed to us. We were just queer. Of course we had plenty of money, and could have lived at Nineteen or Twenty-Three if we had wanted to! The Parisian, the Frenchman, the European, of whatever social class, believes that America is El Dorado and that every American is able to draw at will from inexhaustible transatlantic gold-mines. During the war the Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., and the officers and men of the A.E.F. confirmed and strengthened this traditional belief. I do not blame my compatriots for what is a universal attitude among us towards money. On the contrary, my long years of residence abroad have made me feel that we get more out of life by looking upon money as our servant than Europeans do, who look upon it as their master.

The first thing—the practical and imperative thing—when you set up a home in Paris is to make friends with the concierge. Without his approval and cooperation, your money, your position, your brains will not help you in making living conditions easy. The concierge stands between you and servants, tradespeople, visitors. You are at his mercy. Traveling in Russia, they used to say to us: lose your pocket-book or your head, but hold on to your passport. In Paris, dismiss your prize servant or fall out with your best friend, but hold on to the good-will of the concierge.

Our first skirmish with the SempÉs was an easy victory. We could not keep the baby-carriage in our apartment, even if we had been willing to haul it up and down a flight of stairs. Boldly we announced that we wanted to leave it in the lower hall. "Of course," agreed Monsieur SempÉ. "I was just going to suggest that and to tell you that in my shop I carry everything, fruits and vegetables as well as dry-groceries."

We took the hint, and seldom went farther afield to do our marketing. Madame SempÉ was the first to call us les petits amÉricains. She was capable and kindly, and our friendship became firmly rooted when she discovered that we intended to patronize her shop. The SempÉ commodities were good. This was lucky in more ways than one. For the mice knew it too, and never came upstairs to bother us.

SempÉ himself was a genial soul, partly because he always kept a bottle uncorked. Hard work and temperament, he explained, made him require a stimulant. He took just enough, you understand, to affect his disposition pleasantly. If you had a little complaint to make or a favor to ask, much as you deplored his thirst, you found yourself casting an eye over the man to make sure of his mood before you spoke. If you caught him when the bottle was not too full or too empty, he could fix a lock or put a new mantle on the dining-room gas-jet most graciously.

Our friendship became undying when Monsieur found out that we were the solution of his financial pinches. He came up one night, and, hooking his thumbs in his purple suspenders, asked for a loan of "shong shanquante francs shusqua sheudi." Jeudi never came. To SempÉ's intense relief, we agreed to take out the debt in groceries. This was the beginning of a sort of gentlemen's agreement. A paper, thumb-tacked to a shelf in the shop, kept the record of our transactions. When I came to make purchases in the morning or when Herbert dropped in of an evening to buy a supplement to our dinner for unexpected guests or our own good appetites, we could see at a glance whether to pay cash for what we bought or whether we should do a sum in subtraction. It was generally subtraction, and SempÉ, wagging his head, would say, "This goes well—soon I shall be square with you." But the satisfaction of being square with the world was never SempÉ's for long. The arrival of a barrel of wine or a load of potatoes would send him running up the stairs for the money to help finance his business. In spite of our slender resources we did not feel this to be a hardship. Not infrequently it was an advantage. First of all things one has to eat. We always began to get our money back immediately in the necessities of life. Instead of having our money out in an uncertain loan we took the attitude that our board was paid for two or three weeks in advance.

In another connection, we had the benefit of the advantageous side of the Golden Rule.

In our study of Turkish history we had constant use of Von Hammer's Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman. This meant much transcribing by long-hand at the BibliothÈque Nationale where the typewriter could not be used. If only we had Von Hammer at home! But it was a rare book—eighteen volumes and an atlas—far beyond our means. One day we were browsing at Welter's, the most wonderful bookshop in Paris, on the Rue Bernard-Palissy off the Rue de Rennes near Saint-Germain-des-PrÈs. Monsieur Welter, who took pains to become acquainted with and discover the specialty of every passing client, told us that he had a set of Von Hammer, recently purchased at a London auction. He sent a boy to bring it out. Oh how tempting it looked, beautifully bound in calf! We handled it fondly, but turned regretfully away when he said that the price was two hundred francs.

"Do you not want it?" asked Monsieur Welter, astonished. "It is indispensable for your work and you do not get a chance often to purchase a set of Von Hammer. Never will you find it cheaper than this."

"I do want it, and it isn't the price. I'll come back later, hoping you will not have sold it."

We each had a volume in our hands. I poked my nose between the pages of mine to sniff the delightful odor to be found only in old books. Monsieur looked at us, smiled, and said, "You mean that you haven't the money. You will have it some day. No hurry. Give me your address and the books will be sent around this afternoon."

The delightful relationship thus began lasted until August, 1914, when Welter (who never became naturalized although his sons were in the French army) had to flee to escape internment. His business was sequestrated. German though he was, we never cease to mourn the only expert bookman in Paris. We have tried a dozen since, some of them charming men, but none with the slightest idea of how to sell books. Welter had book-buyers all over the world. Whenever he came across rare books in your line, he mailed them to you with the bill. If you did not want them, you sent them back. Every three months, a statement of the quarter's purchases came, and you sent a check when you had the money. One's attention was brought to many valuable sources, and one was able to buy books of immense value, the possibility of whose acquisition one had never dreamed of.

Monsieur Welter told me years later, when I recalled the Von Hammer incident, that he didn't lose five hundred francs a year in bad bills. "The dealer in old books who does not give all the credit the buyers need is crazy," he said. "What man interested in the things I deal in would think of cheating me? Your husband wanted Von Hammer. I saw that. Any man who wanted Von Hammer would pay for it in time."

We had never had a French book-seller offer us credit, much less send books on approval when we had not ordered them.

When I think of the hundreds and hundreds of books we bought from Welter, I realize one of the secrets of the inferiority of the French to the Germans in business. The French cannot bring themselves to give credit: they have an innate fear of being cheated, and understand commercial transactions only in terms of cash. For years I have made a point of watching French shopkeepers. Invariably they arrange that the money is in their hands before they give you your package.

The other night I went to the Champs-ElysÉes theatre to see a show given by American soldiers of the 88th Division. One act opens with Hiram Scarum bringing a military trunk into his hotel. Staggering under the weight, Hiram hobbles across the stage, plants his trunk on the floor, and sits down on it to mop his brow. He spies a paper across the room, and investigates to find it is the tag belonging to the trunk. Pulling himself together, Hiram spits on his hands, wearily shoulders the burden again, and carries it across the room where he ties the tag to the handle of the trunk. Then he picks up the trunk and carries it back where he had first put it down. Hiram is like French commerce. The Frenchman, with a sense of self-congratulation on his own industry, carries the trunk to the tag. He is surprised to discover that while he has been carrying the trunk to the tag, his German competitor has carried a great many tags and has tied them to a great many trunks. We hear much in these days about the war after the war. We are told by Paris newspapers how the French business men are going to capture trade from Germany. How can the French win in the commercial game? I'm sure I don't know. One is concerned lest the inability to take the large view end in disappointment and disaster for the Frenchmen we love. We are just as sure that our French friends will continue to carry the trunk to the tag as we are that they ought to get a hustle on, give up their old ways, and win the game.

CHAPTER VIII
AT THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE

THERE are many libraries in Paris. Some of them are so famous that I ought to hesitate to call the BibliothÈque Nationale simply "the library." But I do call it that, not because it is the largest in the world (a fact that calls forth instinctively admiration and respect from Americans), but because we love the BibliothÈque from long and habitual association. It is a part of our life like our home.

In the beginning of the fellowship year, Herbert came to realize that books could do more for him than lecturers. A magnetic and enthusiastic lecturer communicates his inspiration: but most professors are decidedly non-conductors. And then, with rare exceptions, university professors are not sources themselves. What they do is to stand between you and the sources. When they have something original and suggestive to say, why not let them speak to you from the covers of a book? If a book does not hold you, you can throw it aside and take up another: the lecturer has you fast for an hour, and you often suffer because his baby did not sleep well the night before. But when the professor speaks from the printed page, he has had a chance to eliminate in his final revision whatever effects of insomnia there may have been in the first draft. If he hasn't done so, you do not need to read him.

When students become full fledged post-graduates, they are at the parting of the ways. Either they go directly to the sources, form independent judgments, and produce original work as a result of constructive thinking, or they continue to remain in intellectual dependence upon their teachers. The latter alternative is the more pleasant course. It requires less effort, and does not make one restless and unhappy. The pleasant days of taking in are prolonged and the agonizing days of giving out are postponed. But if a youngster is face to face with books all day long every day, he either stops studying or commences to produce for himself. Then, too, he is constantly under the salutory influence of being confronted with his own appalling ignorance. Whatever effort he makes, the volumes he summons from the shelves to his desk keep reminding him that others have given years to what he hopes to compass in days. The BibliothÈque teaches two lessons, and teaches them with every tick of the clock from nine a. m. to four p. m.—humility and industry.

There was, of course, much to be learned at the Sorbonne. But my husband had already passed through three years of post-graduate work, and was tired of chasing around from one lecture to another. There were hours between courses that could not be utilized, and the habit of loafing is the easiest formed in the world. It was because we were jealous of every hour in the Golden Year that Herbert and I first turned from the Sorbonne to the BibliothÈque. Later we came to realize that the only thing in common between Salles de ConfÉrences of the Sorbonne and the Salle de Lecture of the BibliothÈque was the lack of fresh air—the universal and unavoidable torture of indoors everywhere in France.

Nine to four, five days in the week, Herbert lived in the BibliothÈque, and I went there mornings—when Scrappie was not on my conscience! One did not have to go out to lunch, as the fare of the buvette was quite acceptable to those interested in books and manuscripts. The old law of the time of Louis XIV holds good in this day. No light but that of heaven has ever been introduced into the BibliothÈque. After gas was discovered, the law was not changed. Even when electricity came, presenting an infinitesimal risk of fire, the Government refused to have the vast building wired. The prohibition of lights extends, of course, to smoking. You cannot strike a match in the sacred precincts. So, after lunch we used to go across the street and sit for half an hour in the Square Louvois.

ChÂteau de la Reine Blanche: Rue des Gobelins
ChÂteau de la Reine Blanche: Rue des Gobelins

Do you know the Square Louvois? I'll wager you do not. For when one passes afoot up the Rue Richelieu, he is generally in a hurry to get to the Bourse or the Grands Boulevards. If you go on the Clichy-OdÉon bus, you whizz by one of the most delightful little green spots in the city of green spots without noticing it. The Square Louvois has on the side opposite the BibliothÈque Nationale a good-sized hotel, which was named after the square. The boundary streets on the north and south are lined with modest restaurants and coffee bars, within the purse of petits commis and midinettes. In Europe there is not the hurry over the mid-day meal that seems universal in America. Dyspepsia is unknown. The humblest employee or laborer has from one hour and a half to two hours off at noon. There is competition for benches and chairs in the Square Louvois between twelve-thirty and two. Mothers who are their own nursemaids have to resist the temporary encroachment of the Quarter's business world. We from the BibliothÈque make an additional demand. We must have our smoke and fresh air. And we never tire of the noble monument to the rivers of France that is the fountain in the center of the Square.

"Funny, isn't it," said I, "how things turn out to be different from what you expected—your thesis for instance. Gallicanism is simply a closed door for the present."

"I tackled too big a subject," admitted Herbert.

We were smoking in the Square after lunching in the buffet of the BibliothÈque Nationale with the Scholar from Oxford.

"I'll wager," said Herbert, "that those greasy fellows in the salle de travail discovered long ago what I have just learned. You start with a general subject and a century. You narrow down until you have a phase and a decade. If I ever do Gallicanism, it'll be limited to the influence of the conversion of Henry of Navarre upon the movement. I could work till my hair was grey developing that. But I should be narrow-minded and dry as bones when I finished."

"Ah! You must not quarrel with the greasy fellows," put in the Scholar from Oxford. "That is research. They are not narrow: they are specialists." The Scholar is a canny Scotchman who gives his r's their full value, and then some.

Allowing the letter r to be heard for sure is another point of contact and sympathy between Scott and Frank. Just as the cooler Teutonic temperament seeks the sun, and has been seeking the sun right down through history, in trying to reach the Mediterranean, the cooler Scotch temperament seeks the sun where it is nearest to be found—in France. It is the attraction of opposites.

"You Americans," said the Scholar, "with your Rocky Mountains and your Niagaras naturally approach research from the general to the particular. It is far easier for men born in an older civilization to begin with a specialist's point of view."

"I know, I know," said Herbert, "I had to work that out and I had to change my whole subject, too. I wobbled from Gallicanism to Ottoman history."

"That's no sin," declared Alick. "A man engrossed in research is human. Going to Turkey was bound to influence your thinking. The traditions of France still hold you, but the memory of Turkey is strong enough to change the trend of your work. Go on with your origins of the Ottoman Empire and be thankful you have discovered a line off the beaten track."

"Yes," I cried, "and for goodness' sake stick to constructive ideas. You research-fiends waste too much time trying to prove that the other fellow is wrong. Instead of remaining scientists you get to be quibblers. But I must leave you now. I cannot put my whole day into the BibliothÈque. I have to mix up tea-kettles and dusting with pamphlets and cards for the file."

As Herbert and the Scholar from Oxford passed by the solemn guard at the door of the salle de travail, I lingered in the lobby musing about what we had been saying. I leaned for a minute against the pedestal of the SÈvres vase and watched Herbert and Alick take their places side by side at the old inked desks. I looked through the great polished plate glass that makes the salle de travail and the travailleurs seem like a picture in its frame. I knew from experience that once the two men had got their noses in their books they would not look up. There was no use in waiting for a smile.

"Boc ou demi?" asked the waiter.

Herbert and I and the Scholar from Oxford were lunching together in the Quarter. The BibliothÈque was closed for cleaning, so it was an off day.

Herbert and the Scholar asked for bocs, and I thinking to be modest chose a demi. My eyes nearly dropped out of my head when the men got glasses of beer and before me stood a formidable mug that held a pint. Emilie told me afterwards that if I wanted that much beer again the waiter would understand better if I ordered "un sÉrieux."

The Scholar from Oxford had the habit of living in our apartment when he came to Paris. Memories of hospitality on the part of himself and his wife when we were on our honeymoon in Oxford were fresh, and when the time came for the Scholar's next look at manuscripts in the BibliothÈque Nationale, there was no question in our mind—nor in his, for that matter—as to where he should stay. We set up a folding-bed in the dining-room and tucked him in. No matter if we did not come back to the Rue Servandoni at meal time. If we did not want to bother getting up a meal, we put the apartment key into our pocket and sallied forth on what we called a baby-carriage promenade. There was always some little place where we could eat when we got hungry. Once we dined in a crÉmerie chaude for no better reason than the attraction of a diverting sign on the window—Five o'clock À toute heure.

To-day we had decided against Brogart's, our usual haunt, on the rue de Rivoli. At Brogart's you could lunch for Fr. 1.25 with the plat du jour and a satisfying range of choice in the fixings that went with it. It was 1.20 if you invested in tickets. Then you were given a napkin-ring to mark your serviette, and a numbered hole in the open-face cupboard screwed to the wall beside the high desk where Madame sat while she raked in the money and kept a sharp eye on her clients. There was a division of opinion between Mother and me during a flying visit she made us just before Christmas. We took her to Brogart's. She saw a fellow, some kind of a wop with a greasy face and long hair, pick his teeth with a fork. She never went back to Brogart's again. They don't do that in Philadelphia. At least if they do, Mother had never happened to see them. Herbert and Alick and I were less difficult to please. To-day it was only because we had wandered far afield that Brogart's did not see us. We had found a table that pleased us in a restaurant that bore the sign "Au rendez-vous des cochers." We were not looking for a novel experience. We were not tourists, you understand. It was on account of the budget.

Everybody knows that the cochers of Paris are no fools. They can drive a horse, but they can drive a bargain too and afterwards settle down on their high box and fling you shrewd observations about art or politics or what not. But there is more to it than that. When you have lived a while in the Latin quarter you know who are the expert judges of cooking. In the old days, the meal you could buy in a tiny dark rendez-vous des cochers was as tasty as anything you could enjoy on a Grand Boulevard at ten times the price. Minor details like a table-cloth and clean forks and knives with each new plate are not missed when the gigot is done to a turn and the sauce piquante is just right. The rendez-vous des cochers restaurant has one distinct advantage over the swell place on the Boulevards. If you are in a hurry to go to the Concert Rouge and have had no dinner, you can stop for a second at a cab driver's restaurant while you buy a portion of frites. The luscious golden potatoes, sprinkled with salt, are wrapped in a paper, and you consume them as you walk up the Rue de Tournon. They don't mind babies there. Scrappie was asleep in her carriage. Monsier le Patron came out and rolled the carriage ever so gently under the awning beside the glass screen by the restaurant door. He beamed at us benevolently, then stepped over to explain that he was a pÈre de famille and that courants d'air inflame babies' eyes.

The Scholar from Oxford is a Scotchman with the Scotch affection for France. Before the war he came to France and Italy every year to make enigmatical notes in his own handwriting reduced to cramped proportions. The notes were placed within columns that were inked out years ago when he began the monumental work. The columns are drawn across the short dimension of the paper, so that you have to turn the thing sidewise to read it.

There is a variety of ink. The row of notes at the top is all in the same color. Three quarters of an inch in black mark the first year's hours spent in the BibliothÈque. Run your eye down a space the width of your thumb and the ink changes. Count how many ink colors you see, and you'll know how many times the Scholar from Oxford has come abroad on his grant. He carries his papers in a shiny black oil cloth serviette. He was modestly imperturbable when with my usual vehemence I gave him a good scolding because he confessed he had no copy of the precious sheets.

"So worked the old monks in the days of the Reformation," said I, "when a fellow spent his life time laboriously copying the Bible with his own hand."

"Ah," mused the Scotchman with his eyes far away, "they were great scholars, the monks."

"But it was slow," I protested, "often a man did not live long enough to illuminate the device at the end of his chapter. Only a great enthusiasm carried his successors to the end."

"Without them, think what we should have lost!"

"But they worked like that, you stubborn one, because there were no typewriters or secretaries. You cannot persuade me, Alick, that there is any extra virtue in using their methods today. You should adopt modern methods so that you could accomplish more. You don't seem to realize that thirty years from now the world will call you what you are, Britain's greatest Latin scholar."

Unconvinced that mediaeval methods belong to mediaeval times, the Scholar from Oxford lit another cigarette. He still persists in carrying around Europe, in spite of wars, his priceless record of years of labor. But he has since become Professor of Humanity at a great University. The chair that he holds dates back to the day of the methods to which he remains faithful.

Home again, I was making the coffee. But I was not out of the conversation. Our kitchenette was six feet from the dining-room table. Herbert started to light his cigar.

"Ah, my lad," said the Scholar from Oxford, staying Herbert's hand, "you haven't asked the lady's permission!"

"I guess I can smoke in my dining-room," answered Herbert.

"You have to ask my permission then," laughed Alick, "before you smoke in my bedroom."

Thank heaven, the BibliothÈque Nationale does not make my husband and my guest stupid. If I could not look forward to jolly evenings, I should make war upon research work, much as I like BibliothÈque Nationale.

CHAPTER IX
EMILIE IN MONOLOGUE

"CARROTS cost money!"

"Yes, Emilie?"

"I had to throw several sous' worth at your window before you got awake this morning, and when they rolled back some of them fell in the gutter. Old SempÉ saw me take them, and I'm sure he'll ask you to pay for them," said Emilie, nodding her round head with its well-oiled straight black hair. Emilie was no more gifted hirsutely than in other feminine adornments. Since the day we found her cleaning our apartment, at the request of the SempÉs, I had been studying her carefully to decide whether new clothes and soap would help her appearance. Clean and togged out in some of my things, she was not radically changed. But her heart of gold shone in her eyes, and I was not long in learning to love her.

"You never hear that bell," continued Emilie. "What a conscience you must have to sleep that way. The carrots are cheaper than paying me from eight o'clock when you sleep on."

"Never mind about the carrots," I laughed. "We need you for an alarm clock, and we did not wake up until one fell on the bed."

Emilie was my first servant, and I did not have her all the time. All my life I had been demanding things from servants, but I had never bossed one in her housework. I dreaded tackling the problem. Emilie was the easy solution. The femme de mÉnage system is one of the advantages of life in Paris. You do not have to house your servant, and she is not in the way in a small apartment when you do not want her there. You can have as much or as little of the femme de mÉnage as you like, or (as was more often the case in my first year of Paris housekeeping) as you can afford to pay for. I put Emilie out of the house when the clock showed the number of times forty centimes per hour that I could spare. Forty centimes per hour, did I say? Yes, and that was ten centimes more than others paid in our street. Now it is a franc per hour, and the femmes de mÉnage of 1919 growl most of the time and stop work when they want to whether your house-cleaning or laundry is finished or not. Emilie set in deliberately to attach herself to me and accepted all my vagaries. I flatter myself that it was not so much for the extra two sous per hour as for the fact that she liked me. My queer ways interested her. She could never understand why I washed Scrappie's silk-and-wool undershirts myself, but was willing to pay her several francs for sitting on the coal-box reading a newspaper or dozing for hours while I went to the opera.

Emilie was a vaudeville singer and dancer who had lost her figure and most of her teeth before the bi-decennial of her stage career.

"To think, Madame, that a few years ago the posters on the Kiosque at the corner of this street used to announce my number at the music-halls, and to-day I'm down on the floor washing your tiles!"

I was pulling the baby's wool stockings on drying-boards.

"You say you used to be on the stage?" I led on sociably.

"Yes, Madame, comique excentrique. That is why I cannot cook. My profession required me always to eat in restaurants, but I can wash dishes, clean rooms and build fires. Thanks to God, for the service you need, I know how to mind babies. I never had anyone to help me with Marcelle."

Marcelle was a fifteen year old girl, hare-lipped and cross-eyed, but her mother loved her dearly. Emilie did not say who Marcelle's father was. But she was not as reticent as the woman of Samaria, and would have scorned to come to me under false pretenses. Tout savoir est tout pardonner. If you cannot live up to the spirit of that motto, do not plan a life without worry for yourself in Paris.

"Last year, before I found you, Madame, Marcelle and I were out of work. When you came in here in July we had earned only fifty francs in two months. Marcelle did not get her job as laundry apprentice until October. Oh no, we didn't exactly starve. You can get cold-boiled potatoes and they sell bits of bread and left over coffee very cheap at night when the restaurants close."

Here she sat up to wring her floor-rag into the brown water of the pail.

"I hope you'll not regret spoiling me the way you do. You let me talk, but you can trust me not to forget myself. Take this afternoon when those ladies are coming for tea. You know how I wait on the table. That is a rÔle. I get my happiness in considering everything a rÔle. I play at being femme de mÉnage. These dirty old clothes are my costume: the bucket and mop are stage properties."

"Do you like having company at tea?" I broke in.

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On who they are." Here Emilie made up her mind to speak with firmness. "Now, without indiscretion, Madame, the ladies you asked for this afternoon are not interesting. I was here when two of them called and you told them to come to tea."

"Why not?"

"The Latin Quarter is full of women like that. I know. I have worked for them. I have been cleaning at studios and apartments like yours in this neighborhood ever since I left the stage. I have seen what these women paint. Oh la! la! Sometimes you cannot tell the canvas from the palette, Cubism they call it, to hide the fact that they cannot draw and could not reproduce a figure or any recognizable object to save their lives. No, I'm not talking of beginners. I'm talking about the old ones, the women, Americans and English, who do not know how to paint kitchen chairs or carry a tune, and yet art schools and music academies flourish on their fees. They were misfits where they came from. It pays their relatives to send them money every month so they won't come home. But why should Paris—that is, our part of Paris—be the dumping ground? You say that there are more men of that kind than women? Yes, oh yes, many more. But then, after a certain time men give up posing. They do not mind being taken at their real value. When they are failures, they admit it. The women keep on pretending."

Emilie was as good as her word. With a shining face and hair well slicked back from her ears she appeared at tea time. The ample front was covered by a clean white apron. She stood at my elbow, her black beady eyes keen to see what I needed before I asked for it. Oui, Madame and voilÀ, Madame came as softly as though, born in a pantry, she had always served tea. But she could not keep up the play without the relief of an occasional entr'acte. When she brought me a pot of fresh tea and guests happened to be looking the other way, she would give a broad wink and bolt from the room. When the guests left, the kitchen door was closed.

"I ought to have made one more appearance, Madame," said Emilie a few moments later as she settled herself comfortably in the steamer-chair and took a pinch of snuff. "The model servant would have helped them on with their coats. But I had all I could stand."

"But you did very well, Emilie."

"I got more fun out of it than you did. I said that you were wasting your time on those people. What did they do? Told you you looked badly. Asked why you were so tired. Advised you to get a doctor for the baby's cough. And you think they meant well? That it was solicitude?"

Here Emilie laughed heartily and wiped the snuff off her hands with the greasy blue apron that now replaced the white one.

"You are naÏve, dear Madame. Women love to tease each other that way, especially those who are not well or strong themselves. They hate you for not having ills. If you told them that you had a physical examination last week and the doctor said you were in perfect condition, they would shake their heads gravely and warn you that you are underweight for your height."

"They did make me mad, I confess, when they volunteered advice about Scrappie. They used to scold me for nursing my baby and they scolded me to-day when they heard I had stopped nursing her."

"That's it! That's it!" cried Emilie. "Next time they talk like that, show them the little thing, beautiful rose de mai that she is, and ask them in what way she looks badly."

Throughout the year at Twenty-One, Emilie was a tower of strength to me. When we sent our pitchpine back to William Shakespeare and packed our rugs and brasses, she was on hand as she had been the day we set up our Lares and Penates in the Rue Servandoni. She urged that we take her to Constantinople with us. We did, and never regretted it—if only for her comments on the Turks and Greeks and Armenians. When she realized that we needed other care than she could give us, Emilie quietly dismissed herself and went back to France to live in Bordeaux. We see her there occasionally. She still wears my old hats and blouses. She is still a femme de mÉnage. And Marcelle has continued to wield the flat-iron.

CHAPTER X
HUNTING APACHES

I WAS bathing Christine before the fire. Gabry and Esther came in. The two girls settled themselves in steamer chairs.

"We want to know if you will let us come and sleep in your dining-room to-night," asked Esther.

"Sure," I answered, "but, mercy me, the bed in there is a little bit of a narrow one...."

"That doesn't matter," said Gabry.

"No, indeed," agreed Esther. "We can cuddle up close and we shan't be in it very long."

The baby began to howl. I had been listening to the girls and the side of the tub had got hot.

"Poor little dear," said Esther. "Her mother forgot her and she began to parboil."

I had the baby safely on my lap now wrapped in towels. Emilie carried away the bath tub.

"What's going on to-night?" I asked.

"Well, it's a fling," said Esther. "You know how it is up at the Hostel. They are so fussy—you would think it was an old ladies' home. Two boys that came over in our ship have been studying forestry in some German school. They are here for the holidays. We got them to promise to take us with them to-night to see the town—cafÉ stuff, you know."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"To a cellar where they do the Apache dance."

"You don't want to see that," I suggested. "It isn't real. Just a plant to catch parties like you. Why Herbert and I saw that stunt done in a cinema the other night. There was a French couple back of us. They giggled over it. The man said, 'Wait a minute. The police are sure to come in after that party of Americans are comfortably settled with some drinks.'"

"You don't mean it," said Esther. "Don't take the edge off our spree."

"I'm not taking off edges. Only in the cinema the other night it was instructive the way the policemen came in. After they had driven out the most murderous dancing Apaches, the Americans thought it was too hot and fled. You ought to have seen the way fake Apaches and barmaids laughed at them afterwards. What is your plan for the night?"

"First to dinner in some spicy cafÉ, then the theatre. We're going to see Chantecler. Everybody's crazy about it."

"Excepting people who think it is silly," put in Gabry.

"Well, if it's silly to see actors dressed up in peacock feathers," cried Esther, "we'll have a good time. And there'll be supper somewhere afterwards."

"Going to make a regular night of it, aren't you?"

"That's just the point. Helen, you're a dear to be so sympathetic. Up at the student Hostel...."

"Did they object there to your going?"

"They don't know a thing about it. It would never do to tell them."

"Why?"

"They'd begin to preach," protested Esther. "A pack of school teachers anyway. That's why we want to spend the night here. We'll just explain, you understand, that we're going to spend the night with their dear lovely Mrs. Gibbons. And they'll never know a thing about the fun."

The girls were moving towards the door.

"The boys will come here to get us," called Esther. "We'll come down about half-past six. Herbert won't mind, will he?"

"We must move along now," said Gabry. "I have a singing lesson."

"And I have a fitting at the dressmaker's," added Esther. "Ta, ta, Helen."

I felt in my bones that I didn't quite know what to do about it and would wait until Herbert came home.

When Herbert returned from the BibliothÈque Nationale at noon, I told him about my visitors.

"Why on earth—" he began to comment.

"Oh, they are going to do the Grand Boulevards with a couple of young American fellows who are in Paris for a vacation," I said.

"What's the matter with those girls," exclaimed Herbert. "What's gotten into their heads? Do they think they can come here and start off on an expedition like that? If they were older, it would be different. If they're afraid to tell the Hostel people, it shows they know well enough it isn't just the thing for them to do."

"I thought so myself."

"Well, why didn't you right up and say it from the beginning?"

"Girls wouldn't take it from me. My game was to be absorbent and get the whole story. They're nearly as old as I am. I couldn't dictate to them. I don't know how to get out of it."

"I see," mused Herbert.

The girls came in about six o'clock to dress for dinner. They had their suitcases and some flowers, and Esther brought her light blue hat in a paper bundle. I had told them to telephone their boys to come to dinner with us before starting out for the theater. This was the only way I could think of to manage things so that Herbert could see them before they started away.

Esther put on the pretty bright blue dress she had bought at the model shop to go with the light blue hat. She placed the hat, still in its paper cover, on the top of the wardrobe in the dining-room. Gabry played with Scrappie, sitting on the floor beside her, where she was tied in her papa's steamer chair. Esther perched herself on the stool in the kitchen and watched me frying sausages. Herbert came in after a bit and wheeled right around from the front door into the kitchen. He didn't have to walk. It wasn't far enough.

"Hello, Esther, what are you up to?" said Herbert.

"Hello, Herb."

"Come on in the other room. I want to talk to you," said Herbert.

He closed the door and I heard them talking hard.

"Gee!" said Gabry. "Esther sounds mad, doesn't she?"

"Herbert's telling her what he thinks of the party," I said.

"He doesn't want us to go, does he?" said Gabry.

"Oh, he's not breaking up the party. Not a bit of it. He only says that seeing nobody of your crowd knows French and seeing that your mother made us promise to look after you, he wants to know what cafÉ and theatre you're going to."

Just as a rather mad-looking Esther and a smiling Herbert appeared, there was a ring at the bell, and in came the boys, two rosy-cheeked American youngsters. They came into the kitchen to talk to me a moment, and then Herbert took them into the dining-room to explain things. I heard him talking with them, nice American chaps they were, not looking for trouble a bit. Not the type out for the booze, just bright youngsters who were going on the boulevards out of curiosity.

We lighted up the candles in the bedroom-study. Herbert put some new ones in the candlesticks on the piano and we soon got things going. One of the boys was taken into the bedroom-study to play a tune on the piano, and soon Esther cheered up with a face more or less of an April one.

"Hello, boys," said Herbert. "The girls have been telling us—Mrs. Gibbons and I want you to have dinner with us here first so we can talk over the party."

"Sure," said John. "We have tickets for Chantecler."

We sat down and tackled coquilles Saint-Jacques.

"You don't want to get in any trouble over this game," Herbert went on. "Not speaking French and all that...."

"That's so, too," said Joe.

"Chantecler is fine and dandy," said Herbert. "If you want supper afterwards, here's the address of a nice little cafÉ."

"Sunday school picnic," moaned Esther.

"Esther's inconsolable. She thinks I'm spoiling the fun. But these boys don't want to get into a doubtful little hole. You don't know what you're doing, Esther," said Herbert.

"I'm as old as your wife, so there."

"You fellows do not want to spend a terrible lot of money. I know you don't. Esther is mad as a hornet at me because I am going to squelch her idea of going to Montmartre or Les Halles for a hot old time. I don't want to seem a poor sport, but you know some of those cafÉs are fakes, others are what I shall not mention, and there is a third category of really dangerous ones. The entire business is carried on to catch and mulct tourists. If you happen to drift into the fake places, nothing more serious would happen than getting stuck good and hard. You would simply have to pay the waiter whatever was on the bill. If you were considerably older and knew how to speak French, the slumming might prove interesting—for one evening. But for you the game is not worth the candle. I don't mind your going for a jaunt along the boulevards, and I can tell you some of the cafÉs that are all right. But as for Les Halles—that doesn't go."

The boys were sensible. They fell in with our suggestions without discussion. After dinner the four went off to their show. Next morning I heard Esther telling Scrappie all about it.

"The W.C.T.U. wasn't in it, baby. Chantecler was written to please kids of your age. There was nobody in that Y.M.C.A. cafÉ your daddy sent us to. My blue hat was the most conspicuous object in the place. We didn't see a thing. No types, no wickedness, no models, more than we ordinarily see around the Quarter."

Gabry's eyeglasses were shaking on her nose.

"Tell her what Monsieur SempÉ said," urged Gabry.

"Yes, baby," said Esther, who was laughing in spite of herself now. "Our mama boys wanted to be polite in the American way last night. They brought us here and didn't want to leave us until they saw us inside your saintly doors. But Monsieur SempÉ stopped them down at the street door. He simply yelled at the boys, 'Ça ne se fait pas À Paris, Messieurs.'

"No," concluded Esther, "from start to finish, baby, there was nothing about our party that would have hurt your lily-white soul."

CHAPTER XI
DRIFTWOOD

I WAS nursing Scrappie. Herbert came into the bedroom and started to speak slowly as if he wasn't sure how I would take what he was going to say.

"Fellow out here who is hungry. What shall I do?"

"Feed him," said I. Herbert did not have to tell me that he had no money to give the man to buy a meal. "Couldn't you ask him to dinner if he is all right?"

"Well, he is sort of an old chap," said Herbert doubtfully.

I lighted a candle and put it on the end of the mantel-piece nearest to the baby's bed. She was perfectly contented to go to sleep alone if she could watch a candle flicker.

When I had settled Scrappie and opened the window and closed the door gently, I went into the dining-room and found Mr. Thompson. Sparse grey hair, watery blue eyes, a talkative individual who hoped he was not bothering us too much. He wore a frock coat with shiny revers. His cuffs were unstarched and frayed, but they were clean. Herbert had brought in some cold boiled potatoes. In those days you bought them cooked at the charcuterie for the same price that you got them raw at the greengrocer's. It was a good scheme. You could peel them and slice them in a jiffy,—then warm them with eggs broken up and scrambled in the pan beside them. This with cheese and nuts and liqueurs made a meal without using too much gas. You did it yourself, using no more energy than would be taken out of you if it had been done by a cook.

Mr. Thompson did not lie when he told Herbert he was hungry. He had three helpings of everything. He said little during the meal, but he did not eat with his knife. When it came to cigars, he pushed back his chair and spread out his hands to the boulet fire. Casting his eye from the molding to the floor, he included the dining-room and all the rest of the apartment with a sweeping gesture and a couple of "Ha-Has."

"From the looks of this joint, you two youngsters haven't any more money than you need. This is a good joke on me, too good a joke to keep to myself. You have given me a square deal along with a square meal, and I appreciate it. I have lived for years in this Quarter and have earned precious little money. Sort of a down-and-outer. I am, I suppose, one of the Quarter's charity patients. Don't worry. I am not going to beg of you. First time I came to Paris, it was by way of England. I stayed a long time in Oxford and made friends with the Cowley Fathers. Then I buried myself in the BibliothÈque Nationale, for I was starting a thesis in church history."

"Indeed," cried Herbert. "I have a fellowship in Church History myself. What is your subject?"

"Religious orders after the Reformation," said Mr. Thompson.

"Have you published anything?" asked my husband.

"No," said Mr. Thompson. "Queer thing life is. We get loose from our moorings when we least expect it. You won't believe me, but American generosity was my undoing!"

"How could that be?" I put in.

"Don't you know," said Mr. Thompson, "that we are not as much the captain of our souls as we like to think?"

He was in a steamer chair now, and lying back, he blew smoke at the ceiling.

"But you were saying, Mr. Thompson," said I.

"I was saying more than I ought to," he mused.

He had forgotten his cigar. Herbert twisted a bit of newspaper, touched it to the glowing boulets and held it out to Mr. Thompson. Matches are expensive in France.

"Oh!" he started. "I was away back years ago. Thank you. I was wrong a minute ago when I told you I had said too much. I have said too little. You have made me feel at home, and I shall be frank with you. It sometimes wrecks a fellow's career if he receives just a little too much help. What I am talking about is quite a different thing from what I may have suggested just now. Not a person spoiled with too much money. But I was spoiled by the fact that at a certain time, I was able to put my hands on ever so little money when it was not good for me. Not the money itself, you understand, but the fact that the game is so easy."

"But I don't understand," I protested.

"Of course you don't," said Mr. Thompson.

He threw the butt of his cigar on the floor, put his foot on it, and took another from Herbert's box.

"Sorry I haven't better cigars to give you," said my husband. "These carrÉs À deux sous just suit my speed."

Alas for the carrÉs À deux sous! Of them as of many of our joys we must say Ichabod.

"The time came when I ran out of money—but altogether out of money, you understand. I waited until I was pretty hungry before I told anybody. Then the American Consul did something for me. Somebody gave me a pair of shoes. Other persons gave me money, and the day was saved. Again I became absorbed in my work, to be interrupted by poverty. This time I went to the pastor of the American Church. He looked me over. Must have thought I was a good case, as he saw to it that several people did something for me. After all, it comes easily, and I have lived like that for years. Sometimes my clothes don't fit very well, but what is the difference. It has grown upon me until I am utterly unfit to earn my living. You get nothing twice from the Consulate, and churches are not good for much. Besides, the churches keep a list of dead-beats. It is the individual Americans one meets that give away their money carelessly. I found somebody who listened sympathetically to my hard-luck story. The story itself was no lie the first time. But it was so easy—there was the temptation. I tell you frankly that I fell. I discovered that I could do it again when the hard-luck story was not true."

"I hunted you up," continued Mr. Thompson, "with the idea of getting something out of you. I suppose if I put as much energy into holding down a job as I do this, I could earn my living. But the habit of living on the kindness of other people has me in its grip, and I do not stick to work when it is given to me. I have been pretty faithful to the BibliothÈque all these years, for it is heated there. I can read my paper, write some letters and study a little on my church history. The thesis is growing slowly, but that is all I can say I have done these twelve years.

"There are other people who do the same thing, you know. You have met them without knowing it. Artist fellows, youngsters as well as old ones, understand the game. Do you know how they work it? It is known now, for instance, that you receive informally every Wednesday. There are other days and hosts of women. So it goes. A fellow can get along very cheaply like that. Pay thirty or forty francs a month for a place to live and work, two sous each morning for cafÉ au lait passed across the zinc—good coffee too, as you perhaps know. They let you bring your roll with you if you like. It will cost a sou. One roll and a cup of coffee is enough after you get used to it. Your only large expense is the noon meal.

"Generally the evening meal you can pick up. You find in the social register the names of all the ladies, kind and unobservant, who have days at home. You stick a big paper on your wall and mark it off in seven columns, one for each day of the week. You make a list of the women who have receiving days, and you drop in somewhere every afternoon about five-thirty. The tea party is pretty well finished, but there is usually plenty of food left. The ladies have to provide for more than really come. You do that yourself, Mrs. Gibbons. The ladies do not notice that you eat more than one or two sandwiches and plenty of cake. If they do notice it, it makes them feel happy, and there is your supper. If you do it systematically with a list like mine, you do not have to go to Mrs. X's house more than twice in the winter. A lot of people in the American colony have receiving days. It is easy enough to know them. All of the boys know a few, and we take each other around. The artist fellows have a cinch. All they have to do, if they have a conscience, is to present the hostesses to whom they are the most indebted, with a couple of worthless sketches. Nobody ever suspects anything.

"You can slide in and out in the Latin Quarter and meet any number of charming people. They never stay too long and there are always new ones coming in. No hostess is superior to the flattery implied when her tea is appreciated. I have learned to praise sandwiches so that I can get a fair supply. I write an article occasionally, and that covers my rent. Clothes are an easy matter. Any number of people in Paris will give away clothes. You see I am a deadbeat. I was a deadbeat to-day when I saw in the Herald that Mrs. Gibbons was going to be at home this afternoon."

Mr. Thompson got up to go.

"Where did you put your overcoat?" asked Herbert.

"I have none," said my guest.

Herbert's eyes met mine. I telegraphed "Yes."

Certainly we gave Herbert's old overcoat to Mr. Thompson. As we talked about it afterwards, Herbert observed,

"We could not help giving him the coat, could we?"

"No, of course not."

We never saw Mr. Thompson again. It isn't in the picture. Driftwood!

CHAPTER XII
SOME OF OUR GUESTS

THE best fun of having a home is sharing it with your friends. But you deprive yourself of this fun—in a very large measure, at least—if you make entertaining a burden or a great expense. In the Rue Servandoni we tried out theories about hospitality that have become firmly rooted family principles. Guests are always welcome, and we never feed them better than we feed ourselves. Company is the rule: not the exception. I suppose my Irish temperament made this possible in the beginning. Now we would not give up our way of living for anything in the world. By the standards of my own family I am not regarded as a good housekeeper. I am finicky only about cleanliness and the quality and quantity of food. The rest doesn't matter. That is, I have no almanac to show me when to put away the winter clothes and when to do Spring house-cleaning. I do not get "all out of kelter" if the wash is done on Thursday instead of Monday: and I never "put up" fruit or bake. I buy my preserves from the grocer and my bread and cake from the baker.

When I look back on Rue Servandoni days and try to analyze my attitude towards housekeeping, I think first that I may have been demoralized by living through the Armenian massacres just before going to Paris. It was enough to make me happy in the morning to realize that my husband and baby were alive. Did I have a new sense of values, born of suffering? Or perhaps it wasn't anything as high-brow or pious as that. Perhaps it was the inheritance of shiftlessness that came down to me from the ancient Irish kings. This curious form of original sin persists and makes me able to agree with one who sang when things all got messed up,

Now I do not claim that my way is altogether right and that my maternal Pennsylvania Dutch strain does not occasionally assert itself, though feebly. I enjoy formal and well-ordered entertaining when it is not a pretense—when I do not have the uncomfortable feeling that my hostess has worn herself out getting the meal ready or is offering a meal beyond her income.

The alternative in the Rue Servandoni was to have friends take us as we were or to make an occasional splurge. The latter was thoroughly distasteful to us both. We held that what was good enough for ourselves was good enough for our friends, and that they would rather come to our simple meals than not come at all. How could we hope to compete with the CafÉ de Paris or ArmÉnonville? And we knew that many who came to us paid their cook more than our total income.

Where stood the walls of old Lutetia
Where stood the walls of old Lutetia

Is not the question of entertaining a good deal like the question of other people's wealth? If you are continually striving to keep up with friends richer than you, you are bound to feel poor. We could put our heads out of our window, and pity ourselves because we were not living in steam-heated, electric-lighted Number Nineteen or Number Twenty-Three. But then, across the street, Number Twenty and Number Eighteen had logements beside which our apartment was a palace.

Shortly after setting up our Lares and Penates in Number Twenty-One, a friend from Denver dropped in just before supper. He was a judge and silver-mine owner, the father of one of my Bryn Mawr college-mates. I urged him to stay. He was excusing himself, when I volunteered the information that our supper consisted of cornmeal mush with milk, and that was all. He stayed, and told us that it was the best meal he had eaten in Paris. "I just love cornmeal mush, and I cannot get it at my hotel," he said. We believed him. He spoke the truth.

There was always room at our table for friends. An extra plate, and a little more of what we were having for ourselves—that was all there was to it. In a big city, especially a city like Paris where shops are in every street, getting more food quickly is no problem. Herbert would just slip downstairs to SempÉ's for eggs, another chop, another can of peas, an additional bottle of wine. Next door was the bakery.

The best friends of our married life have come to us through unpretentious entertaining. The contact of the home is different from the contact of the office or club or formal gathering, and it has enabled me to take every step forward with my husband. Our broadened vision, our intimate sources of information, the steps upward in our profession are largely the result of the dinner-table and the after-dinner smoke before the fire. One illustration shows how chance influences the whole life.

Early in the autumn of 1909, we received a letter from a Paris lawyer who had just returned from settling insurance claims in massacre-stricken Cilicia. He had been in Tarsus just after we left, and wanted to meet us. I wrote back to him, as I would have done to anyone with an introduction like his, "Come to dinner, and if there is a Mrs. K. bring her with you." He sought us out in our little street. There was no Mrs. K., but the spontaneity of the invitation and its inclusiveness had prompted him to break his rule of not accepting dinner invitations. He was a charming man, full of information and inspiration. When I brought on the asparagus, he said that in Poland they put burnt bread crumbs into drawn-butter sauce. I jumped right up, and exclaimed, "Nothing easier! We shall have asperges À la polonaise right away." In three minutes the asparagus was to his taste. The lawyer thought out, and made a suggestion that would certainly never have occurred to him had I arranged a formal meeting in response to his letter. He told us that the experience we had in Turkey we should not regard as accidental. "Why did the massacres occur? You must have asked yourselves that. Now drop your research into Gallicanism and French ecclesiastical history. A thousand men are as well equipped for that as you. Turn your attention to the Turks and the Eastern Question, and from that go into the study of the contemporary diplomacy of Europe. The Russian and Hapsburg Empires are built upon the Ottoman Empire. Study the relation of Turkey to Poland. This is the field for you!"

In the last few years I have often thought of that evening. We followed the lawyer's advice. He helped us. He encouraged us. He used to come to dinner every Tuesday night. We went back to Turkey and came again to Paris before the Great War. During the years of absence, there had been frequent correspondence. When we returned, the Tuesday evenings were resumed. If my husband was ready for the work that came to him with the war, it is thanks to the Paris lawyer. The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire, The New Map of Europe, The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near East, are the outcome of table-talks with the lawyer that began in the Rue Servandoni.

In the pension of the Rue Madame we met people whom we invited to come to see us in the Rue Servandoni. We asked them to our table. They came. And they have been dinner guests in our different Paris homes during the past decade.

There was the Catholic Archbishop of Cairo, an Arab who had the story-telling gift of his race. You do not know what it is to hear a story told until you have listened to an Arab. The Archbishop unfolded to us the lore of the East. There must have been something about les petits amÉricains that interested him, for our meals could not compete with Mademoiselle Guyenot's. He used to sit in the steamer-chair, with his arms folded over his gold crucifix, his cape thrown back on both shoulders (which gave a dash of red), the end of a long white beard rubbing the most prominent buttons of his cassock front, and eyes twinkling in unpriestly fashion. He was the reincarnation of Nasreddin Hodja, prince of Anatolian story-tellers. Herbert pokes in his bath. One night, when Scrappie went to sleep earlier than usual, Herbert started to make his ablutions before the dining-room fire while I was busy in the kitchen. The door-bell rang. In came the archbishop. There was a swift change of persons and rooms. Herbert finished his bath in the kitchen in an incredibly short time. He did not want to miss a moment of the archbishop.

Michi Kawai was with me in school as well as in college. Imagine my delight at finding her one day looking at old furniture in the Rue des Saints-PÈres. If I ever thought of Michi, it was in Tokio. And I never would have thought of Michi in connection with French antique furniture. But that is Paris for you. Sooner or later all your friends come to Paris. You run across them accidentally and invariably they are doing something you would never have dreamed of associating them with. During her months in Paris Michi was a frequent visitor in the Rue Servandoni. She was one of those delightful combinations of Occident and Orient that Japan produces better than any other nation. She was equally at home with French and American friends, and, when Emilie was not there, knew how to juggle my eight cups and saucers and spoons back and forth between the tea-table and the kitchen, without guests catching on, more dexterously than any of my American girl friends.

We started our married life among the peoples of the Near East, and we found them out there just like other folks, when we took the trouble to come into intimate contact with them. Racially of course they are different from us as they are different from each other. Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Persians—each one of these names calls up faces of people I love. I have known them in their homes and in my home. A strong tie binds us to the Armenians. When you have shared the sufferings, dangers and hardships of a people, they belong to you and you belong to them in a peculiar way. Armenians came to the Rue Servandoni, poor boys with no money and no home who had escaped from Turkey, struggling students, successful painters, brilliant musicians, wealthy merchants. Every collector of Egyptian curios, of Turkish and Persian rugs, of Oriental pottery, knows Kelekian of the Place VendÔme. His small shop is wedged in between a florist and a ticket-scalper. In the window you never see more than half a dozen objects. There is always a bowl as a piÈce de rÉsistance, a bowl that only a Morgan could afford to own. Pause and look over the curtain, the chances are that you will see Monsieur Kelekian sitting by a glass case of Egyptian scarabs. He will be smoking, and his right hand will be on the case. To know Monsieur Kelekian is to have faith in the resurrection of Armenia and in the future of one of the oldest races of history. We came to know him through his interest in the Adana massacres. He had never heard of the Rue Servandoni, and the street was hardly wide enough for his automobile. But he came to dinner with his wife—in spite of a disapproving chauffeur, who thought there must be some mistake and who insisted on inquiring for us first at Number Twenty-Three and then at Number Nineteen. Although his nose never turned down, he became accustomed to stopping in front of the grocery!

Other chauffeurs and cochers learned during that winter a new street in Paris, and the first time they, too, made the mistake of stopping next door. Mrs. Evans, sister-in-law of the famous dentist, had a pair of black horses that shone like the varnish of her victoria. "Dear Mrs. Evans," as all the women called her, was interested in every good work. She approved of my husband, because he was a parson, and of me because I had lived in a missionary college. She knew we had no money and did not expect us to have any. Her carriage was ours for afternoon rides in the Bois de Bologne. Scrappie, "that darling missionary baby," must have her weekly outing. Mrs. Evans, I am sure, believed that the air was not what it ought to be in our quarter of Paris and that God had intrusted her with the responsibility of seeing that we were occasionally transported elsewhere. During that year we made other friends in the American Colony, who, like Mrs. Evans, cared for us for what we were. They made Paris home to us in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and the intimacies then formed have never been broken.

Gypsy Smith was an English evangelist who came to Paris that winter for a series of revival meetings in the English-speaking community. He had been traveling all over the world for twenty years. His wife had had to stay at home to look after the children. Now, for the first time, she was free to accompany him, and came to Paris with him. We showed the Smiths some of the principal tourist points of interest one morning, and they came home to lunch with us. In the way of entertaining, they had been "touching the high spots" in Paris, as Gypsy Smith was sought after by the substantial people of the British and American communities. Our little home was a revelation to them of the fact that there were other foreigners living in Paris than the rich. Mrs. Gypsy was greatly pleased with the novelty of finding "just folks" in Paris. "A cozy little nest you have here," she said, giving me a nudge with her elbow.

There were so many people to see in Paris, old friends from home as well as new friends, that I soon began to have my afternoon. On Wednesdays I received in that tiny dining-room, with my eight cups and saucers and spoons, just as if I were mistress of a large establishment. At first, our neighbors thought it was a christening or funeral. When they realized that les petits amÉricains over the Épicerie were having a weekly "at home," they were confirmed in their impression of our wealth. I confess that it was crowded at times and that the party had to overflow into the bedroom. But it was fun, especially when one of my girlhood friends, who had known me in Germantown days in my mother's home, would bring her whole family along to see me, and exclaim, "Why, Helen Brown—!" But I would get them all in.

Two days after Christmas, my husband urged me to go walking with him. He pointed out that no one would come. But I refused. I had more conscience when I was young than I have now. Being "at home" meant sticking by the game. I had cheered up the boulet fire in the dining-room. The cups were on the table. My china platter held a gÂteau mocha of dear memory. Shall we ever again be able to buy layer-cakes with coffee icing an inch thick done in the delectable ups and downs like a wedding cake? And that at one franc-twenty-five?

"Run down, dear, and get me some hot crescents. It's after four o'clock, so they'll be ready."

"Now, look here. You've got to be sensible. Everyone has hosts of things to do Christmas week. Nobody will come. We'll eat the cakes for supper. Let's go over the river."

"No, that wouldn't be fair. Somebody might come."

Herbert got the crescents, put more boulets where I could get them easily, and was gone.

I settled myself in the steamer-chair. No sound except the ticking of our little traveling-clock, and the dropping of a boulet on the hearth. An hour slipped by, and I began to realize that I might just as well have gone out. A ring at the bell. When I opened the door, there was my husband holding a bouquet of roses big enough for a bridesmaid.

"Good afternoon," said he, bowing low; "do Mr. and Mrs. Gibbons live here?"

"To be sure," said I, stifling a giggle. "I am Mrs. Gibbons."

"Indeed." My visitor shook hands with me and explained, "Mrs. Gibbons, I am delighted to meet you. I knew your husband years and years ago—before he was married, in fact. The first pleasure I have allowed myself in Paris is to look up my friend Gibbons and his wife."

He hung hat and overcoat in the hall, and handed me the flowers. "What a charming dining-room. Dear me, have I intruded? You were having a party?"

"Just my day at home."

We chatted for a full hour, discussing the fate of the House of Lords, about which my new friend confided that he was writing an article. He hoped some editor would publish it. We talked of the possibilities of next year's Salons and disagreed on the subject of futurist painting. I told my visitor about the many American friends that were turning up, and how the Gibbonses realized that if they wanted to get any work done in Paris they would have to stop acting as guides. What did he think about adopting a policy of telling people that Thomas Cook had mighty good guides at ten francs a day? Perhaps, however, we should make the last exception with him, and show him the town.

We talked of Christmas, and then I was asked if I had a baby. I replied that of course I did. She was over in the Luxembourg Garden with Marie, who kept her out late on my at-home day, but who would soon bring her in.

"People that see resemblance in coloring say she looks like me, but those that see resemblance in contour say she's the image of her daddy."

"So!" said my visitor.

I put my arms around the contour.

CHAPTER XIII
WALKS AT NIGHTFALL

THE Prince whom Tartarin met in Africa had lived a long time in Tarascon, and knew remarkably well one side of the town. He knew nothing of the other side. This puzzled Tartarin until he found out that his noble friend's residence in Tartarin's native town was a compulsory one. The Prince had ample time to study a certain aspect of Tarascon in detail from the little window of his penitentiary cell. We do not all have the privilege of devoting ourselves, as the Prince did, to a minute study of just one view from just one vantage-point. And yet, in certain things we share the Prince's experience. We become accustomed to a definite aspect of the things we see to the exclusion of other aspects. Thus it is that I know many parts of Paris familiarly as they appear at nightfall. I could go to these quarters at other times, but I never have. I fear the breaking of the spell. I fear disillusion. And if you want to follow me in Paris walks through this chapter, plan your strolls from five to seven during the winter months.

It began this way. In the BibliothÈque Nationale, as in the Paris of parks and gardens, the closing hour follows the sun. The BibliothÈque has no lights. It turns you out at four, half-past four, five or six according to the season. During the months of longer days, we stayed until the last bell. In the winter we were put out before the afternoon was over. One did not feel like making for home immediately. It was too late to go far afield. We started in to explore Paris in a widening circle from the Rue de Richelieu. My husband had covered much of this ground in summer months with the Scholar from Oxford. When the light held out until late, they had time to visit old Paris with the books of Georges Cain for guides. In the winter months Herbert took me over this ground again. But I saw it all at nightfall or after dark.

It was a wonderful discovery, to combine exercise with interesting sight-seeing at the end of the day. The habit of walks through city streets, thus formed, has been persisted in through many busy years. I recommend it, even to tourists. Use your precious days for churches and museums and palaces. After they are closed, walk for an hour or two each night. You will find diversity, and, like Horatio, things you never dreamed of. And no matter how long you live in Paris, there is always something new to explore and something equally new when you follow beaten tracks.

You have to be—or grow—catholic in your tastes if you want to enjoy what Paris at nightfall offers. Of course in the beginning you look for certain things. You have a goal: tracing the city walls from old Lutetia to Henri IV; seeking traces of mediaeval days; spotting Renaissance architecture; visiting historic spots or buildings associated with famous names or events; reconstructing Paris of the Revolution; or following the characters of Victor Hugo through Les MisÉrables. Before long you join all these goals, and jump from architecture to history, from history to literature. In the end, every walk you take is the observation of living people inseparable from an incomparably picturesque setting. It may take a long time to realize that your primary interest is humankind. But when you do the world is a kaleidoscope presenting new pictures, wherever you may be, each more fascinating than the one that preceded it.

"Seek and ye shall find" is a promise with a condition attached to it. You have to look before you see. An effort of the will is required. Without that effort, impressions are false or transitory or give no reaction that sinks deep. We passed close to Messina just after the earthquake. The captain of our ship obligingly slowed down to quarter-speed. Passengers crowded against the rail on the Sicilian side of the straits.

"Why, Messina is all right!" someone cried. "The newspapers have been exaggerating again."

"Wait," suggested a lawyer. He got out his opera glasses. Others did the same. As we studied Messina from the sea, and looked for the deep fissures, the crumbling walls, we found them all along the coast. The American soldier who told me, "Since I been in France I ain't seen nothing but kilometres and rain," was not looking for anything else.

Strolling after dark helps to bring into the foreground the human element in the picture of Paris streets. Your field of vision is limited. You do not see too many things at once. And you have to keep your eyes open. Many a quaint corner, many a building, is less often missed at nightfall than during the day.

Paris is divided into arrondissements, each one with its local administration, its maire, its mairie, its postal service, and its police. The postal authorities have tried in vain to insist upon the placing of the arrondissement indication upon the letters. But they have never had much success. It is enough to remember where your friends live without having to keep in mind twenty different arrondissements! Before the war your arrondissement meant little to you, and you often did not know its number if you wanted to be married, to register the birth of a new baby, or got into difficulties with the police. Since the war, residents in Paris came to know their own arrondissements because of bread tickets, passports, income-tax declarations and other annoyances. But in planning your walks at nightfall, it is helpful to take a map of Paris and know something about the divisions of the city. We started our explorations by hazard, and then found to our astonishment that we had been going from one arrondissement to another, practically following the numerical order.

The BibliothÈque Nationale is just on the border between the First and Second Arrondissements. Arrondissements One to Four are the old city on the Rive Droite between the Grands Boulevards and the Seine. Arrondissements Five to Seven include similar quarters on the Rive Gauche. Some of the most interesting strolls are in the outer arrondissements. But the seven inner arrondissements provide enough for years without ever having to take the subway or tram.

The four Rive Droite arrondissements stretch from the Place de la Concorde to the Place de la Bastille, and include the Ile de la CitÉ and the Ile Saint-Louis. The three Rive Gauche arrondissements stretch from the Eiffel Tower to the Jardin des Plantes. On the Rive Droite the Place de l'OpÉra and the Place de la RÉpublique, and on the Rive Gauche the Place de Breteuil and the Place de l'Observatoire, are the outer corners of the inner arrondissements. The Boulevard de SÉbastopol on the Rive Droite and the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Rive Gauche form the only straight route, cutting through the mass of tangled streets of succeeding centuries. Running north and south, this central line divides the arrondissements as the Seine does, running east and west.

I have a horror of guide-books, partly because I do not know how to use them (I never have learned!) and partly because I love to find my way without pre-meditation and by accident. But many of my readers will never have the same opportunity I have enjoyed of discovering fascinating spots at nightfall. Why should I resist the temptation of indicating some of the strolls that make the late winter afternoons delectable?

Everyone knows the Rue de Rivoli as far as the Oratoire or perhaps to the Tour Saint-Jacques. At the crossing of the Boulevard SÉbastopol, the Rue de Rivoli leaves the familiar heart of Paris and enters the Fourth Arrondissement. It becomes the Rue Saint-Antoine a couple of blocks before the Eglise Saint-Paul. There the first break in the straight line from the Place de la Concorde occurs. You deflect a little bit to the right, and before you is the Bastille column. The Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Saint-Antoine are the main artery of the Fourth Arrondissement. No quarter of Paris affords more variety in walks at nightfall. Starting from the Boulevard de SÉbastopol, the streets on the left, at angles and parallel to the main artery, are a labyrinth. Here is the Ghetto in a setting incomparably more picturesque than the Ghettos of London and New York. I doubt if even the oldest Paris cocher finds his way here unerringly. Through some of the streets no carriage can pass. The narrowest street in Paris, the Rue de Venise, is here. Beginning opposite the HÔtel de Ville, the Rue du Temple cuts through the Ghetto all the way to the Place de la RÉpublique. Then come the equally interesting right-angle streets, the Rue des Archives and the Rue Vieille du Temple. On the latter faces the Imprimerie Nationale. And do not miss the parallel streets, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue du Roi de Sicile, Rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonne, Rue des Rosiers. Further along (now we are in the Rue Saint-Antoine) the Rue de Birague leads one short block into the Place des Vosges, one of the rare bits remaining of Paris of Henri IV.

On the right hand side we have the HÔtel de Ville, the old buildings behind the LycÉe Charlemagne and the Quai des CÉlestins. Several bridges cross to the Ile de la CitÉ and the Ile Saint-Louis. The Pont Saint-Louis connects the two islands. There is nothing more wonderful in Paris than to cross the Pont Sully from the eastern end of the Quai des CÉlestins, walk through the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Ile, and come suddenly upon the apse of Notre Dame, protected by its flying buttresses.

In the Second Arrondissement, start from the Place des Victoires at the end of the Rue des Petits-Champs, and find your way through the various tortuous routes that bring you out on the Grands Boulevards to the Boulevard PoissonniÈre, the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and the Boulevard Saint-Denis. A few hundred feet from the Grands Boulevards, to the right of the Rue Saint-Denis, as you go toward the river, Paris of the Revolution remains in almost as full measure as in the Sixth Arrondissement.

We must not leave the Rive Droite without mentioning two walks at nightfall in the outer arrondissement. From the Place de la RÉpublique, the most interesting glimpse of a crowded workingmen's quarter can be gained in an hour by walking up the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, which becomes the Rue de Belleville. There is a steep climb until you reach the Eglise Saint-Jean-Baptiste. To the right is MÉnilmontant, dominating the famous PÈre-Lachaise cemetery, and to the left you can climb still farther to Buttes-Chaumont. The second walk is along the Quai de Jemmapes, which you reach by turning to the left from the Rue du Faubourg du Temple just after crossing the canal. A few blocks up, on the right, through the Rue Grange aux Belles you pass the HÔpital Saint-Louis, a group of seventeenth-century buildings which continue to do blessed work in the twentieth century.

Dear me! I have forgotten Montmartre, where you climb endless flights of stone steps and find—despite the tourist rÉclame—probably more of old Paris than in any other part of the city.

On the Rive Gauche, the walks at nightfall are more difficult to indicate. You can go anywhere in the three inner arrondissements, and you will not be disappointed. Walk year after year and you will begin to wonder whether you ever will follow out the oftformed resolution of returning to America to live. In the Seventh Arrondissement the region between the Quai d'Orsay and the Rue de SÈvres, the Rue des Saints-PÈres and the Invalides is the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where are to be found the finest residences in Paris, far ahead of anything in the Etoile Quarter. But unless you are lucky enough to have the entrÉe to aristocratic and diplomatic Paris, you can only guess at the beauty of the gardens whose trees thrust alluring limbs over high walls and at what is behind the stately portals of the hÔtels.

In the Sixth Arrondissement the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue de Vaugirard are the best streets to take as guides in your wanderings. Between the boulevard and the river, and between the boulevard and the Rue de Vaugirard, most of the streets are thoroughfares, a swarming mass of autos and wagons and push-carts, between five and seven.

What shall I say of the Fifth Arrondissement, most fascinating of all to me because I know it best at nightfall, I suppose? My favorite nightfall walk in Paris is behind the PanthÉon. Start at the Place Maubert, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, climb the Rue de la Mont Sainte-GeneviÈve. Turn to the left through the Rue Descartes, and you will find yourself in the Rue Mouffetard. Here you are as far from modern Paris as you will ever get. You walk for nearly a mile with no interruption of trams and omnibuses. No taxi cab or truck would dream of using the Rue Mouffetard as a thoroughfare. And yet, on the Rue Mouffetard, to eat and drink and dress yourself and furnish your house, you can buy all you need. You do not have to hunt for it: it is displayed before your eyes. The Rue Mouffetard. Here you are as far from modern Paris time, and I might shrink from some of the foodstuffs, if not all, it offers, were I to buy by sunlight. But by flickering torch-light the Rue Mouffetard is Araby to me. And I never come out at the Avenue des Gobelins without a sigh. Why isn't the Rue Mouffetard just a bit longer?

A VISITOR once asked me how it was possible for Paris to maintain so many cafÉs, and said how distressing it was to see so many women in them and there was more drinking than in New York or London—question and inferences all in one breath, just like my sentence. My friend was bewildered because he did not understand the raison d'Être of the cafÉ in French life. He thought that a cafÉ was a place to drink according to the American notion of drinking. The women were bad women in his eyes and the men on the downward path. To one who holds this curious notion the number of cafÉs in Paris and the crowds in them and at the little tables in front of them are inexplicable and alarming. CafÉs, restaurants, brasseries and zincs line the boulevards, and there are at least two or three to a block in every street. Owing to the intensive apartment house life shops of all kinds are more frequent in Paris than elsewhere, but you may have to walk to get anything you want. To drink or eat, no. The place is right under your nose.

All restaurants serve drinks. I know of only one non-alcoholic restaurant in Paris: that is the vegetarian place on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs! If you did not eat in a "drinking-place," you'd pretty soon starve. Many of the big cafÉs do not serve food. Some have one dish, called the plat du jour, with cheese and fruit afterwards. Others have oysters and snails and their own specialitÉs. Others, while not advertising meals, serve a table d'hÔte or a very limited À la carte. In all, however, hot coffee is to be had at all hours and every kind of a drink is on tap. The zincs are little bits of places where you get hot coffee, beer or a petit verre. Coal and wood merchants also serve alcohol. In the more humble streets (which are to be found in every quarter), cafÉs are dirty stuffy places, known as dÉbits. Rare is the "drinking-place" that has not its terrasse. This may be only a chair or two and a single table on the side-walk.

The terrasses of restaurants as well as of cafÉs are maintained throughout the winter. It is a familiar sight to see a table-cloth flapping in the wind, held down by a salt-cellar and a mustard-pot. The days are few that you cannot sit out. It does not get very cold in Paris and an awning protects you from the rain. In some of the boulevard cafÉs the terrasses are actually heated by stoves!

The Paris cafÉ is wholly different from the American saloon. None thinks it is wrong to drink in France. Total abstinence is a funny American idea to our friends overseas. Taking a drink in public is as natural as putting your arm around your girl in public. Everybody does it. You rarely see a drunken man or woman just as you rarely see poverty. Alcoholism (by which is meant poisoning the system and breaking down the health by excessive use of alcohol) is an evil France has to combat as much as any other country. But the French have never had it preached to them that the evil can be overcome by prohibiting the use of wines and liquors or by the example of a part of the community voluntarily abstaining for the sake of weaker brothers. The anti-alcohol movement in France does exist. As the maintenance of war legislation against absinthe and kindred spirits proves, it has public opinion behind it. But the connotation of alcoholic is limited in France. The Gallic sense of proportion prevents the French from extremes in anything. Since they do not drink to excess, they have no reason for regarding beer and wines as alcohol. Often your French friends tell you that they never touch alcohol. In the same breath they offer you delicious wine.

Scruples understood and appreciated in America are often meaningless when you live in another country. Stick to your white ribbon principles if you will, but do not persist in your notion that cafÉs are places where it is not respectable to be seen. Why cut yourself off from an indispensable feature of Paris life?

The PanthÉon from the Rue Soufflot
The PanthÉon from the Rue Soufflot

The hour of the apÉritif finds the terrasses of the cafÉs crowded. You may have difficulty in getting a place outside. Having worked all day and perhaps having walked home, the Parisian saves a half hour before dinner for his appetizer. He sits at the little table in front of his favorite cafÉ and watches the passing crowd. It is no hastily swallowed cocktail, leaning against a bar and shut off from eyes like mine by a swinging screen door. It is no prerogative of man. Sometimes on week days and always on Sundays, his wife and children are with him.

When we were living in the Rue Servandoni, we got into the habit of going out for our after-dinner coffee. The reason was probably the same as that of most Parisians. Living quarters were small. The baby was asleep in the front room. Toward the end of the month especially we were not always in a position to keep the tiny dining-room fire replenished all evening. We thought of the gas bill. We liked to get a little air. We were fond of music. Arm in arm we would walk along the Rue Vaugirard to the Boul' Miche. From the Closerie des Lilas near the Observatoire to the river you had plenty of choice for your after-dinner coffee. At the foot of the Rue Soufflot is the CafÉ du PanthÉon. On the corner of the Rue de la Sorbonne is the CafÉ d'Harcourt. Just off the boulevard, on the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, is the Taverne Pascal. These were our favorites. Pascal has no terrasse. We went there when it rained or when we thought of Munich beer. Harcourt used to have a red-coated orchestra, and was the gayest place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At the PanthÉon you paid two sous more, but the coffee was better. We never had to spend more than a franc for the two of us. A checker-board or cards could be had of the waiter. If you wanted to write letters, you asked for a blotter and pen and ink.

Just around the corner from us, on the Rue de Tournon, was the Concerts-Rouges, the blessed institution to make unnecessary the tragedy of would-be musician and singer failing to get a hearing. Pianists, violinists, cellists and future opera stars had a place to put on their own concerts at little cost. We were the audience. Of course it was not all amateurs: the management had to promise an audience. A good orchestra gathered around the stove in the middle of the room. You sat in a chair such as they have in school rooms, whose right arm spread out generously to give space for your notebook. There was room, too, for coffee-cup or stein. The only rule of the Concerts-Rouges was silence. You could move your chair away from the music. When you were not interested in the number, you read or wrote. Many theses and dramas and poems have been worked out in the Concerts-Rouges.

The Boulevard du Montparnasse, which has since become our home, was not too far from the Rue Servandoni to be frequented for after-dinner coffee. The DÔme, on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail, and Versailles and Lavenue, opposite the Gare Montparnasse, were after-dinner coffee haunts where friendships that have lasted through the years were formed. We still sit there. Lavenue, after five years of silence, again offers music. But we miss Schumacker, beloved of the Quarter, who fell, they say, in the ranks of the enemy. His face is one of those I cannot forget. I see him now, blue eyes and bright smile and bushy hair, bending over his violin on the little platform by the piano. He seemed to play his heart out and never tired. I always like to write my letters at Lavenue. When I called for "de quoi Écrire," the waiter brought a tiny bottle of ink, spillable and square, sheets of ruled writing paper and the cheapest quality of manila envelopes in a black oilcloth folder, whose blotter never blotted. But you did not care. You listened to the music after each page until it dried.

CHAPTER XV
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.

CHAPTER XVI
"MANY WATERS CANNOT QUENCH LOVE"

HIGHER than 1883; higher than 1879; higher than 1876; higher than 1802; higher than 1740; higher than 1699; equalling the flood of 1658, the worst in the history of Paris; finally breaking all records, both as to height attained and as to damage done, such was the daily crescendo of the press in recording the progress of la Grande Crue during the last week of January, 1910. No investing army, no Commune, no revolution, threatened Paris this time. The best friend of Paris had turned against her. For several days the older generation, who passed through the trials of 1871, recalled painful memories and feared a worse peril from the Seine than from the German invaders or the Internationalists.

In the third week of January, from Tuesday to Friday, we were concerned over the news of devastation wrought by floods in different parts of France. There was much damage and suffering in our own suburbs. Sympathetic editorials appeared in the newspapers: relief funds were opened. On Friday afternoon, when we were taking a walk along the quais of the Rive Gauche, we had no suspicion what was going to happen.

Only on Saturday did Paris begin to worry for herself. Neuilly and Courbevoie were flooded. Loroy reported ten drowned. The Seine, within the city limits, suddenly rose ten feet. The first subway tunnel, that of the "MÉtro" from the Chatelet under the CitÉ to the Place Saint-Michel, was filled with water. The river spread into the original "MÉtro" line under the Rue de Rivoli. The second tunnel, that of the "Nord-Sud," was an easy prey because it was still in the course of construction. The Gare d'OrlÉans was invaded. Its tracks, which parallel the left bank of the river under the quais, disappeared. The Gare d'Invalides, whose line runs the opposite direction along the Seine, was also flooded.

On Sunday morning we heard that in the Rue FÉlicien-David people were rowing around in boats. We thought this interesting enough to invest in a fiacre, and took Scrappie in the afternoon to Auteuil. On the way, we got out and wormed ourselves through the crowd to hear the waters swishing around the stair-cases down to the train levels at the two flooded stations. When we reached the Rue FÉlicien-David and actually saw people in boats, we bought photographs from an enterprising hawker, wanting to preserve this souvenir of Paris. Little did most of the crowd dream that within a few days they would not have to go farther than their own front windows to see such a sight!

On Monday evening everyone realized that the flood was not a curious spectacle but a disaster. The river had been rising at the steady rate of an inch an hour, and by nightfall was sixteen feet above its normal height. Herbert decided to report the flood. This justified a taxi-cab by the day. As this was an unheard-of luxury for the Gibbons family, which had few chances to ride in automobiles at that stage of its evolution, of course the baby and I decided to profit by the opportunity, even though it was winter and not the best time of the year for joy-rides. Anyway, I was interested in the great drama that was being enacted, and we could tell Scrappie about it later. From notes taken at the time, I am able to reconstruct the story of days as stirring as any of those during the Great War.

On Monday afternoon we went up and down the quais. All the river industries, with their wooden buildings squatting on the river bank under the shelter of the solid ramparts of the quais, were swept away. Freight and customs stations and depots came within the grasp of the river. At the EntrepÔt de Bercy and the Halle aux Vins, barrels of the spirits and wine were first gently floated and then drawn out into the angry stream. The water in the Nord-Sud tunnel was threatening the Gare Saint-Lazare. The Eiffel Tower moved slightly.[C] The cellars of the public buildings along the river front—Palais de Justice, Chambre de DeputÉs, HÔtel de Ville, Monnaie, Institut, Chancellerie de la LÉgion d'Honneur, Grand Palais, Louvre—were gradually flooded until their furnishings were extinguished. At Billancourt we saw the inundation of the Renault automobile works and the Voisin aeroplane factory. The effect of the latter disaster reached as far as Heliopolis in Egypt, where an Aviation Week was scheduled. In those days aeroplanes were in their infancy and depended upon a single factory for their motors.

Tuesday morning a heavy snow was falling. Awakened early by an explosion, we thought that the Pont de l'Alma was being blown up. This heroic measure had in fact been contemplated by the city engineers in order to prevent the backing up of the water into the Champs-ElysÉes district. The flood was rapidly gaining street after street in Auteuil and Charenton. A rumor was afloat that we would soon be cut off from the outside world. This meant a run on provisions and profiteering by shopkeepers. We yielded to the common impulse and laid in kerosene and potatoes for ourselves and condensed milk for Scrappie, paying double prices and thinking we were lucky in having a chance to buy.

On Wednesday morning commenced what we regarded at the time as a real reign of terror. Underground communication ceased. Owing to the inundation of their power houses, electric-trams stopped running. The subway station at Bercy collapsed. Sewers began to burst in all quarters of the city. A subterranean lake formed under the Rue Royal from the Place de la Concorde to the Madeleine, and the street was closed to traffic. In front of the Louvre and at the Pont de la Concorde soldiers worked night and day raising the parapets higher and building barricades with paving-stones and bags of cement. By evening the water had reached a height of thirty feet, breaking all records since 1799. Refugees began to pour into the city by the thousands and were lodged in the old Seminary of Saint-Sulpice near us, the PanthÉon and other public buildings. The Red Cross began to be displayed throughout the city. Boats and sailors arrived from seaports. The markets required substantial police protection to prevent mobs from taking them by storm.

On Thursday and Friday the fight against the ever-rising waters was continued with desperate energy. In spite of all that human skill and labor could accomplish, the Seine pushed its way over parapets and through barricades, flooding rapidly the quais and adjoining quarters. By means of subways and sewers (channels opened to the river by man's hand and that had not existed in the seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century floods), districts far from the river suffered equally. Auteuil, Grenelle, Charenton, Bercy were submerged. On either side of the TrocadÉro the palatial private homes of the quais were in the Seine up to the second story. The river appropriated to itself the entire length of Cours-la-Reine from the Pont de l'Alma to the Pont de la Concorde, reached the fashionable restaurants at the foot of the Avenue des Champs-ElysÉes, and partly surrounded the two palaces of Fine Arts, souvenirs of the Exposition of 1900. The streets between the Avenue des Champs-ElysÉes and the river formed a transplanted Venice.

Hotels and stores on the Rue de Rivoli, the ThÉÂtre FranÇais—and even the OpÉra—found their heat and light cut off by the attack of the Seine. Far away from the quais, in the neighborhood of the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Seine, following the subway tunnel, burst forth into the Place du Havre and the Cour de Rome. Hasty barricades were of no avail. One could hardly trust his eyes when he looked up the Boulevard Haussmann from the OpÉra and saw boats flitting back and forth as far as Saint-Augustin and the Boulevard Malesherbes. On the Rive Gauche the aspect of Paris grew even more alarming. The Esplanade des Invalides and the Quai d'Orsay joined the Seine. Soldiers threw a pontoon bridge across the Esplanade for pedestrians. But taxi-cabs and buses were compelled to plunge into the water hub-high. We saw motor-drawn vehicles stalled because the water had reached their engines, while the old-fashioned cochers went merrily by, proud of their superiority. All the people in fiacres had to do was to put their feet up on the cocher's box. The Chamber of Deputies and the Ministery of Foreign Affairs were approachable by boat. The angle formed by the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Quai d'Orsay and the Rue du Bac was all under water. In this angle the Rue d'UniversitÉ and the Rue de Lille were practically inaccessible. We who lived in the Latin, Luxembourg and Montparnasse Quarters could reach the Seine only by the Rue Dauphine or the Boulevard Saint-Michel. For increasing torrents soon covered the Rue des Saints-PÈres, the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue de Seine. We had never realized before how the early builders of Paris, in their determination to stick to the river for purposes of defence, had reclaimed ground much lower than the flood level of the Seine, relying upon the masonry of the quais to keep back the river. In modern times we have undermined the natural defences of the Rive Gauche by bringing our railways to the center of the city, by our sewers and by the subways. When you are on a Seine river-boat, you can see all along the river how we have opened up the city to floods. Paris, honeycombed underground, fell an easy prey to the fury of the river. The very skill that added to the material comfort and well-being of the city made Paris vulnerable when the unexpected and unprecedented happened.

The Jardin des Plantes, set apart originally for botanical purposes as its name indicates, has gradually become the Paris "Zoo." Many American tourists go there because it is the place where Cuvier worked and do not realize that it is the home of wild animals also. The Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne is more visited, and I have often heard my compatriots express surprise at the paucity of what they think is the Paris "Zoo." The Jardin des Plantes is less fashionable but much richer in its variety of animals. As it is on the river, it was invaded by the flood. In the first days, before we realized the calamity of the rising waters, the Jardin des Plantes was thronged with visitors. Interest centered around the bear-pits. The polar bears alone seemed to enjoy splashing in the icy waters. The climbers were soon treed. It was an engineering feat to rescue them with planks and prod them into portable cages. The non-climbers narrowly escaped drowning. We watched them lifted out by cranes, caught in sturdy nets. This was the only means of rescue as they tore with their claws the bands that were first placed around them by men whose only experience had been lifting horses and cows from pits.

When the river broke all records, the whole garden was flooded. Many keepers were prevented from reaching their posts. The police took charge. Food supplies were lacking, and the few keepers on hand did not dare to let their dangerous charges loose. The furnaces were flooded and there was no heat. In the monkey-houses the shivering animals, perched high, scolded and growled with chattering teeth. We saw them form a swinging bridge to lift out of the water's reach one of their number who seemed unable to climb. Lions and tigers, cold and hungry, roared and dashed themselves against their bars until the belated order arrived to shoot them. The hippopotamus, contrary to tradition, drowned. Only the birds, proud possessors of the secret of aviation, were superior to the calamity. Here was the occasion for a new Noah. But alas, not even an ark arrived, and it took Paris many years to restock the garden. Even now there are no giraffes like those that used to look at us from their sublime heights.

On the River Droite, the Gare de Lyon was an island. Nearer the flood took possession of the Quai des Grands Augustins with its famous book shop, and, on the other side of the Place Saint-Michel, the quaint old streets up to the Place Maubert. A depression there, where the walls of old Paris once stood, brought the flood up to the roofs of some little houses.

In the Rue Servandoni we escaped the flood: for the ground rises steadily from the Boulevard Saint-Germain to Montparnasse. This put us considerably above the reach of the river. On Friday afternoon, when we were facing a danger that stupified all, the flood was at its height. We conceived the idea of viewing it from the top of Notre-Dame. It was a long process for us, as hundreds of others thought of the same thing, and we could not both go up together. I waited with the baby in the taxi while Herbert faisait la queue (if you do not know what this expression means it would be well to learn it before visiting Paris!) After he came down I had my turn. I was cold enough to enjoy the climb. The view from the top of the tower was unique. The next day would have been too late. We caught the flood at its flood. Paris was swimming. On both sides the cathedral had become an angry, menacing rush of water. Debris and wreckage was choked against the bridge piers. One realized that habit had given us a sense of proportion to the cityscape. The effect of diminished ground-floors and abbreviated lamp-posts and trees was sinister. It was as if elemental forces, subdued and imprisoned when the earth's surface cooled, had escaped. As I looked down on the scene, I felt that abysmal water was breaking forth. Where would it end?

After leaving Notre-Dame we rode up one side of the river to Auteuil and down the other, frequently forced to make long detours. Our remorseless enemy was making sad inroads upon the Ile-Saint Louis, and it seemed as if it would soon sweep away the CitÉ. The Sainte-Chapelle was almost afloat, as were the Conciergerie and the Tour de l'Horloge. The river surpassed the parapets. The arches of most of the bridges had vanished. The colossal statues of the Pont de l'Alma were submerged to their chins. At the Pont d'Auteuil the water reached the wreath around the letter N. Although the newspapers warned us that they might be swept away, the bridges were crowded with sightseers. Curiosity is stronger than fear. The current carried every conceivable object. At the Pont d'Arcole the calamity was forgotten in the sport of watching huge barrels sucked one by one under an arch and jumping high in the air as they came out on the other side.

Returning from Auteuil as darkness was falling, we had to pass above the TrocadÉro, the Rue de Bassano and the Champs-ElysÉes. Newsboys were crying extras: "The river still rises!" We were in darkness. No lights on the Avenue des Champs-ElysÉes. An engineer regiment was fighting the water in the Place de la Concorde by the light of acetylene lamps. The wheezing of an old pump taking water out of the cellar of Maxim's was the only sign of life on the gay Rue Royale. To return to the Rive Gauche we had to go down to the Pont-Neuf. The other bridges were now barred. Does it not speak eloquently for the genius of our ancestors that, with bridges every few hundred feet, the only one that could be trusted—the sole link between Rive Droite and Rive Gauche—was the work of Henri IV at the end of the sixteenth century?

Our chauffeur, keeping up a running comment in which the hint as to his expectation of a substantial pourboire was uppermost, picked his way as best he could back to the Rue Servandoni. We saw strange sights that night, wooden paving-blocks floating in a messy jumble; a few restaurants endeavoring to dispel the gloom with candles; soldiers with fixed bayonets guarding the inundated quarters. It was bitter cold and the glare of their fires was weirdly silhouetted in the rising waters, mingled with the shadows of deserted houses.

The river reached thirty-one feet seven inches at midnight Friday. During the rest of the night and Saturday it remained stationary. Saturday evening it began to fall slightly, and on Sunday all Paris was out in gay holiday attire to view the damage and to celebrate the retreat of the enemy. Lightheartedness returned immediately. Why worry about what was over? This is the credo of Paris. But we had seen during the dark week of flood-fighting a prophetic revelation of the real character of the people among whom we lived. Little did we dream that the precious qualities shown in the flood crisis were to be brought out more than once again in future years. In 1914 we were not surprised at the courage, persistence, unflagging energy and solidarity with suffering of the Parisians. The flood, as I look back on it, did more damage to Paris than was done during the war by German bombs. It was a more formidable enemy than the Germans. I remember the comment of my old Emilie: "Mon Dieu, this thing is worse than fire. You can fight fire with water, but with what can you fight water?"

When the newspapers Sunday morning assured us that the danger was over, I realized how wonderful had been the struggle of civilians and soldiers against the elemental. It was a manifestation of their love for their city. And in the quick and generous relief given on all sides—and unostentatiously—to those who were driven from their homes was the proof that hearts beat fast and firm to help fellow-citizens as well as to save the historic monuments that line the banks of the Seine. That is why, when Herbert went out to preach in the Rue RoquÉpine church, I gave him his text from the Hebrew songster: "Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it."

CHAPTER XVII
REAL PARIS SHOWS

FOR many years the old expression that we can't get rid of, "the Salon," has been a misnomer. There are five Salons, and, as going to see the season's pictures and statues is a form of amusement and distraction in Paris on a par with theatrical productions, all five are equally important. Even if one desires to judge by the standard of art, establishing categories of excellence and importance is impossible. The longer one lives in Paris, the more one realizes the absolute lack of criteria in judging artistic achievement. Painters and sculptors, poets and playwrights and authors, singers and actors do not acknowledge the existence of the jury of public opinion, much less newspaper critics, art juries, premiers prix, medals, and organizations. Schools are legion: standards are the taste and liking of the individual. So we let those who claim temperament and genius have their chance, and we go to the five Salons with equal zest, just as we look constantly for lights under a bushel to please us far from the AcadÉmie FranÇaise and other bodies of the Institut. In June the two "regular" Salons exhibit separately, although simultaneously, in the Grand Palais. There is an autumn Salon of the progressives. The humorists and cartoonists have their own Salon. Last, but not least (in numbers!) the independents exhibit what they please in wooden buildings erected on Cours-la-Reine.

On a late June afternoon in 1914, I stood on the steps of the Grand Palais, after an afternoon in the two big Salons—I mean to say principal Salons—no, in order to escape criticism let me put it "most universally accepted as important" Salons. It was raining hard. I never saw the water come down in sheets the way it did that afternoon. Cabs were of course unobtainable. The wind made umbrellas no protection. And I was wearing my best frock. What a bother! Hundreds waited as I did, preferring the additional fatigue of standing herded almost to suffocation to spoiling their clothes. Suddenly, the rumor spread of a flood, a flood as disastrous as 1910. Only this time the water came from above. So heavy was the rainfall that sewers were bursting and new excavations for subway extension were caving in. Enterprising newsboys brought us the evening papers with scare headlines. Not far from where we were an hour earlier choirboys, going home from practice, were swallowed up in the earth in front of Saint-Philippe-de-Roule. A taxi-cab hurrying along the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-HonorÉ disappeared. The earth opened up under a newspaper kiosque and a shoe store at the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann and the Rue du Havre. Eboulements everywhere. The Place de l'Alma was a gaping hole, tramway tracks and pavements falling into the new subway station.

HÔtel de Ville from the Pont d'Arcole
HÔtel de Ville from the Pont d'Arcole

My mind went back to the dark week of 1910, which I have just described. Comments of the Salon crowd were identical in reaction to those we heard after the flood. "Outrageous, the incurie of the municipal authorities! Something should be done to protect us against this constant digging. Why, it won't be safe to stick your nose out of doors. These awful accidents—in Paris, mind you! Something must be done!" For an hour it went on like that. Then the storm stopped. The sun, still high at six in June, broke through the clouds. The wind died down. I started up to the Champs-ElysÉes with the crowd. More newsboys! This time the principal headline announced the trial of Madame Caillaux. The Parisians—and I with them—went down into the MÉtro. An hour ago such a risky undertaking would have caused us to shudder with horror. No more underground for us! As I waited in line for my ticket, the man in front of me said to his wife, "Now do you really think that Madame Caillaux—"

I laughed to myself. The Medes and Persians boasted of not changing their laws. The Parisians could boast of not changing their mentality. A danger over is a danger forgotten. Hurrah for the new sensation! My readers may think me guilty of skipping suddenly backwards and forwards in this book from one thing to something entirely different. But remember that I am writing in Paris and about Paris. Paris is like that. I went forward to 1914 to get an illustration for 1910. The very day after we were sure the flood was going down, we lost interest in the Seine. Our great project of an emergency channel for turning the Seine at flood-time died in twenty-four hours and will not be revived until Paris is actually being once more submerged. ActualitÉ is a word for which we Anglo-Saxons have no equivalent. It means the thing-of-the-moment-which-is-of-prime-interest. And the press can create a new actualitÉ overnight.

The Government did this several times during the war in order to relieve a tense internal political situation. During the last German drive we had the affair of the false Rodins, and we turned to read about the new statue exposed as a fake each day before we looked for the new German advance. When the Clemenceau Cabinet was threatened, a twentieth-century Bluebeard, with the police daily discovering new wives, was dished up to us every morning in all the papers.

Back in 1910 we turned from the flood to Chantecler. After seven years of heralding and "puffing," after many mysterious delays that whetted the appetite, the management of the ThÉÂtre de la Porte Saint-Martin announced that the curiosity of Paris would be rewarded at the end of January. The flood was the last postponement. The waters had hardly begun to recede before public interest was again centred upon Chantecler. When the rÉpetition gÉnÉrale was given on February sixth, oldest inhabitants and historians of the French theatre were agreed that not even Hernani nor yet Le Mariage de Figaro had created so universal an anticipatory interest. Was Chantecler merely an eccentric literary endeavor or was it to prove a practical theatrical venture? More than any living writer Rostand had been able to win for his plays recognition as literature and recognition as "money-winners" in the theatres of foreign countries as well as his own.

Looking back over a decade I may be wrong in comparing a past with a present event. But I honestly believe that there was far more interest in Paris in what was going on at the Porte-Saint-Martin on the evening of February 6, 1910, than in what took place at Versailles on the afternoon of June 28, 1919. Interest was lost in the Treaty of Versailles before it was signed. Chantecler had a fighting chance to succeed. Just as the curtain started to rise before the cream of French literary and theatrical circles there was a cry of "Pas encore!" M. Jean Coquelin sprang up from the prompter's box in conventional evening dress. Was there to be another postponement—a fiasco in the presence of the invited guests? No: for M. Coquelin began to recite a prologue, inimitably phrased. He told the audience that they were to be introduced to a barnyard as soon as the farmer's family had gone. It was Sunday afternoon, and when the chores were finished, the animals would be left to themselves. As he spoke, numerous illustrative sounds came from the stage. We heard the young girls going off with a song on their lips, the wheels of a receding carriage, the bells of the village church, and shots of hunters out for their Sunday sport. Then M. Coquelin disappeared, and the curtain went up.

The first two acts were wildly received. The third act was too long and modernisms marred the beauty of the verse. The lyrical continuity of the play was broken by the introduction of a purely satirical effect. The real reason for lack of sustained interest was the mental confusion and weariness of having to imagine the actors as animals. The human mind is incapable of receiving through the sense of vision a representation of the unreal, where the real is at the same time glaringly evident, and keep clear, harmonious, concordant images. No ingenuity could make an actor's figure like a bird's. And then humans do not differ in size like birds. There was no way of approximating widely different proportions of the rooster, the black-bird, the pheasant and the nightingale.

In watching Chantecler I had the same painful impression of how we are handicapped by the multiplicity of necessities we have created for ourselves in modern days as I had in watching the flood. Our evolution has bound us fast with chains of our own forging. Physically and mentally, we have manufactured so many props to lean upon that we can no longer stand on our own feet. Chantecler cannot be compared with the animal plays of Aristophanes for in Greek drama there was no attempt to present to the spectators a visual image in harmony with the audile image. Nor even in Shakespeare's time was the dramatist limited by the difficulties of a mise en scÈne. A Midsummer Night's Dream was an easier proposition for the Elizabethan actor than for Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, despite the properties of Her Majesty's Theatre, the hidden orchestra playing Mendelssohn's music, and the magic aerial ballets.

Our next "real show" was the political campaign for the new Chamber of Deputies that was to inaugurate the fifth decade of the Third Republic on June first. Herbert spent an inordinate amount of time, I thought, in puzzling out the voting strength of the Ministerialist and Opposition groups, and patiently wrote articles for American magazines about Radical Socialists, Clemenceau and Caillaux, to vary his Turkish articles. But whether he treated of French leaders and politics or of Venizelos or of the Young Turks, his articles invariably came back with a polite rejection slip. We put them away and sold them later, when they were out of date, for more than we would have gotten then. Our money for writing came from the Herald, and we realized that if you want to make your living by writing the anchor to a newspaper is not lightly to be weighed.

But though I was not even mildly interested in Radical Socialists, Republicans of the Left, Independent Socialists, Progressists and what not, I did like to go to political meetings. They were good for your French and good for the opportunity of studying the influence of politics upon the Latin character. How the French love meetings! They use our English word instead of rÉunion, just as they always speak of self-government. But they are not at all like us in politics. There are as many parties as there are leaders, and their campaigns center around personalities, not principles.

In 1910, the first round of the election was on April 24, and the final round on May 8. It just happened that May first was a Sunday, and fell between the two election Sundays. Throughout the Third Republic, Labor Day has been a time of fear and trembling for the Paris bourgeoisie. The Cabinet is always anxious on May first. You never can tell what is going to happen when crowds gather in Paris: so the wise Government does not allow trouble to be started. Encouraged by the success of their Ferrer demonstration on the Boulevard de Clichy a few months before, the revolutionary elements decided to make May Day a big event with the hope of influencing the second round of the elections. Premier Briand decided there would be no May Day parade. Believing that the Government would not dare to come into conflict with them in the midst of their election struggle, workingmen's unions plastered Paris with boastful posters announcing a monster demonstration in the Bois de Bologne, followed by a parade to the Place de la Concorde. This was in open defiance to the law, which requires a permit for gatherings in the open air and for parades. But M. Briand was equal to the occasion. Saturday night he threw twenty thousand troops into Paris. They bivouacked in the Place de la Concorde, the Place de l'Etoile, and in the Bois. I took Christine to church. After the service, we went to the Bois for lunch. There were troops on every road in the part of the Bois indicated in the posters as the workingmen's rendez-vous. Here and there little tents with the Red Cross flag were pitched, and to make the picture more impressive doctors in white coats stood before the door. This scared the workingmen more than the soldiers did. We saw many of them in their blue blouses. But they took care not to stop or to walk in numbers.

The bourgeoisie were able to rest easy. Assured that order would be kept, fashionable Paris flocked in great numbers to the Longchamp races. Of course we went, too. As Herbert had a story, he bought the best seats. We were not far from President FalliÈres, and we saw the spring fashions. Scrappie created as much of a sensation as some of the gowns. People who frequent Longchamp are not in the habit of bringing babies with them. But with me it is always, "love me, love my child."

The unions did not have good luck in the spring of 1910. But no more did the clericals and monarchists. Hopes of a clerical reaction were dissipated. Briand was as bitter against the orders as against the unions. The royalists no longer count. We had many royalist friends. Some we knew well enough to ask, "How goes the propaganda?" And they knew us well enough to answer, "Pas de blague! C'est À rire!" "Stop teasing me: it's a joke!" The Duke of Orleans has about as much chance of being King of France as he has of being President of the United States. In our estimates of political conditions are we not too apt to judge France by her checkered past? There is no government in Europe more assured of stability than the French Republic: and this was as true in 1910 as it is in 1919.

Public lectures are a source of diversion to Parisians. We Americans think that we are great on listening to ourselves and others talk. But crowds in France do not need a political campaign, a religious revival or a return from near the North Pole to come together for a lecture. The most surprising topics, treated by men who are not in the public eye, draw attentive and assiduous audiences. Every day you have a wealth of choice in free lectures in Paris. Some newspapers publish the lecture program of the day just as naturally as they publish the theatrical offerings. At the Sorbonne, the CollÈge de France, the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes, the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, the Ecole des Chartes, the various MusÉes, and a host of other organizations offer single lectures and courses of lectures, week days and Sundays, either free or for a very slight fee. Many of the best courses in the various FacultÉs of the University of Paris are open to the public. Just to give one instance of popular interest in a rather technical subject, we used to attend the courses in physical geography of Professor Brunhes at the CollÉge de France. That year he was treating the formation of the mountainous center of France. If you did not go early, your chances of a seat were slim. There were always people standing thronged at the doors way out into the hall. This was not unusual. Any man who knew his subject and who could treat it with vigor and wit was sure of a salle comble. His subject did not matter. One did not have to spend money: free courses were as attractive as those for which a fee was charged. We discovered that Parisians never cease going to school. One is accustomed to see only young faces in the class-rooms of American universities. In the Sorbonne and the CollÈge de France there are students from sixteen to seventy.

If music is your passion, you can indulge it to the full in Paris. With the OpÉra and OpÉra Comique and OpÉra Municipal, there is something that you really want to see every day, and when the music does not particularly attract you, you can be sure of an excellent divertissement, as the ballet spectacle is called. Parisians love choregraphy. And there is choregraphy for all tastes and all moods. Paris is the mother of the spectacle called revue. We have borrowed the name but not the thing. No revue can be successful in Paris unless it possesses distinct quality in dances, costumes, mise en scÈne, and especially in the dialogue. The revue must reflect what Parisians are thinking about, take into account actualitÉs, and interpret the events of the day. This means constant change in the dialogue, suppression of old and introduction of new scenes, to the point where you can go to the same revue in the third month of its run and find something entirely different as far as the lines go. For six months of the year the bands of the Garde RÉpublicaine and of the regiments stationed in Paris play in the gardens and squares on Thursdays and Sundays. The Tuileries offers from April to October open-air opera and concerts in the heart of the city. You pay only for your chair.

The foreigner resident in Paris soon becomes aware that he does not have to leave his own quarter to find a good evening's entertainment. Real Paris shows are perhaps best to be found far from the Grands Boulevards, Clichy and Montmartre. From the heights of superior opportunity one does not want to look down upon the tourist and tell him that he doesn't really see Paris. But the fact remains that when theatres and music-halls and restaurants become rendezvous for foreigners they insensibly lose their distinctive local atmosphere. They begin to cater to the tourist trade and give their audiences what they come to see. This is so true of the Folies-BergÈre, the Casino de Paris and other large music-halls that the program has become half English and the actresses and choruses and clowns are as often of London as of Paris origin. The same foreign invasion on the stage, following the invasion in the audience, is to be found at the Ambassadeurs and Marigny on the Champs-ElysÉes. Alas! even the Concert Mayol type of music-hall has succumbed to the temptation of catering to the big world. English and American "turns" are dragged in by the ears to enliven revues for those who do not understand French, and the spectacle has become a totally un-Parisian jumble of vaudeville. But in the little music-halls of the quarters one still finds the atmosphere that Parisians love and a program offered to their taste. Herbert and I used to go to a theatre on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, just off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where plays were typically Parisian. Another such theatre exists in the Rue de la GaitÉ. In the same street are three music-halls that put on songs and stage revues for Parisians. There are probably a hundred theatres and music-halls of this kind whose names do not appear in Baedeker, and which have resisted successfully the first decade of cinema competition.

Last of all among real Paris shows the foires must not be forgotten. But I speak of these in another chapter because visiting them is a goal for a promenade and not the deliberate seeking of an evening's entertainment. You take in a foire as incidental to a walk, just as your apÉritif or your after-dinner coffee is most often the price you pay for a seat to watch the passing crowd, which, when all is said and done, is the real Paris show.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE SPELL OF JUNE

MY critic points out that after having been so enthusiastic about walks at nightfall and having put myself on record as to the exceptional advantages of seeing Paris in the dark on winter afternoons, rain or shine, I shall be inconsistent in extolling daylight Paris. Why the spell of June, when your walks are wholly in daylight? If it were inconsistency, being a woman I should be within my rights to ask the critic what he expected. But is it inconsistent? I think not. If I love to go out in the rain, if I enjoy city streets at night time, it does not follow that I do not enjoy good weather and the long days of June. It is another aspect of Paris that we get in our walks. We have time to go on longer excursions. We "do" the river and open spaces more than old quarters. And, best of all, in the two Junes of our early married life, we took the baby with us on our strolls. I felt the spell of June when we returned to Paris from Turkey in 1909. I felt it more when we were going back to Turkey in 1910. And ever since, the Paris June has had a charm all its own, deepening with the years. However I may like autumn and winter and spring, June is the best month. The spell is partly due to the knowledge that one is soon going off to the shore or mountains for the summer, and partly to the thought that it might be the last June. Each year we have felt that we ought to return to America in the autumn.

In the Rue Servandoni year, April and May were cold, wet months. Spring fever did not get us until June. Then we decided that all the wisdom and profit of our Paris year was not to be found in the BibliothÈque Nationale. We began to divorce ourselves from daily study by the excuse that we ought to get together a small library on Turkish history. Where could the books be bought more advantageously than on the quais? From the Pont des Saints-PÈres to beyond Notre-Dame the parapets of the Rive Gauche are used by second-hand booksellers for the display of their wares. The bouquinistes clamp wooden cases on the stone parapets. You can go for more than a mile with the certainty of finding something interesting at an astonishingly low price. There is no more delightful form of loafing in the open air. The books are an excuse. They become a habit. In order to prevent the habit from growing costly, you must make out a budget. Some days you are only "finding out what is there"; other days, before leaving home, you divest yourself of all the money in your pocketbooks and wallet except what you feel you can afford to spend. Then only are you safe! I do not know of a more insidious temptation to buy what you do not need than loitering along the quais of the Rive Gauche. In a few days we spent all we could afford for Turkish history. But the afternoon walk started earlier and ended later. We never tired of the quais and the river. We watched fishermen and the barges. We were amused by the men who bathe and clip dogs. We explored the streets between the Seine and the Boulevard Saint-Germain. We stood on the Pont des Arts and watched the people coming home from work. We went often into Notre-Dame. We glued our noses to the window-glass of the art print shops around the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. We selected furniture (from the side-walk!) displayed in the numerous antique shops of the Rue des Saints-PÈres, the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue de Seine. We always came back at sunset, with the westward glow before us. That was when our oldest daughter got the taste of going to bed late.

The narrowest street in Paris is the Rue de Venise, which runs from the Rue Beaubourg across the Rue Saint-Martin to the Rue Quicampoix. But neither in itself nor in its location is it as picturesque as the Rue de Nevers, luring you from the Pont Neuf as you cross to the Rive Gauche. Nowhere else in Paris is one so completely held by the past as in the Rue de Nevers. Here stood the Tour de Nesle. The Mint now comes up to one side of this street for a few hundred feet, but elsewhere it is on both sides as it was in the time of Henri IV. Massive doorways, with bars of iron and peep-holes covered with grating, tell the story of a time when one relied upon himself for protection. No agents in the Paris of the fifteenth century! Going down to the river from the Rue Servandoni, we always took the Rue de Nevers. In it Scrappie's carriage seemed like a full-grown vehicle. There was always the nervous fear that something would be thrown out on us from upper windows, not unjustified, as more than one narrow escape proved. We used to say that when the baby was grown up, we should enjoy taking her on one of the promenades of her infancy, and especially through the Rue de Nevers. We have shown Christine the street, and hope that she will remember it. But she will never show it to her children. Some sanitary engineer, successor of Baron Haussmann, has conceived a project of widening the Rue Dauphine. The Rue de Nevers will soon disappear. Our only hope is that the war will have delayed a long time the fulfillment of projects that mean the disappearance of what remains of mediaeval Paris.

Market day in the Rue de Seine
Market day in the Rue de Seine

The Parisian who goes to New York marvels at our skyscrapers. He is properly impressed with the hustle and bustle of the New World. But it does not take him long to note the absence of wide boulevards and the lack of ensemble in the cityscape. Then he will invariably make two comments: "There are no trees," and "There is no place to sit down." Except the Eiffel Tower, Paris does not boast of a "biggest in the world." It will take Americans centuries to acquire a sense of harmony and proportion in city building. But shall we ever learn to bring the out-of-doors into city life? Until we do learn the big American city will be intolerable in the summer months. Paris, built on ancient foundations, has increased to a city of millions, and one still feels that an outing does not mean going to the country. Boulevards and quais are lined with trees. Every open spot has grass and flowers. Best of all, when you want to sit down to read your paper or look at the crowd, there is always a bench. You do not have to go home or indoors to rest, and wherever you live, a park or boulevard is near at hand. Parisians are as closely huddled together as New Yorkers. But they can spend all their leisure time in the open. The privilege of sitting down on a bench is a blessing. All the year round you can eat or drink out of doors. I have often marveled at the criticism that the French dislike open air, simply because they, like other Europeans, do not keep their windows open at night. The Parisian lives far more in the open air than the American does. To be out of doors day and night is a natural instinct from the cradle to the grave. Trees and benches are a large part of the spell of June in Paris.

Then there were the omnibuses with their impÉriales. When we did not have the price of a cab, we could get on top of the Montsouris-OpÉra or OdÉon-Clichy bus, and go for a few sous from south to north across the river through the heart of Paris. We climbed to the impÉriale of the tram at Saint-Sulpice and rode to Auteuil, on the horse-drawn omnibus from the Madeleine to the Bastille, from the Place Saint-Michel to the Gare Saint-Lazare, from the Gare Montparnasse to La Villette, from the Bourse to Passy, from the PanthÉon to Courcelles. Alas! horses and impÉriales disappeared before the war. The last omnibus with three horses abreast was the PanthÉon-Courcelles line. It was replaced by closed motor-bus in 1913. Each year, when June comes round, I long for these rides. Horses, I suppose, are gone forever. But we still hope for the revival of an upper story on our motor-buses. There never was—or will be—a better way of having Paris vistas become a part of your very being.

Foire means fair. But the term is used for a much more intimate and vital sort of a fair than we have. The French have big formal fairs in buildings and grounds, where a little fun is mixed in with a lot of business. But they have also small street fairs, solely for amusement, and selling street fairs, where amusements have their full share. The Paris foires are a distinct institution. There is a regular schedule for them, as for Brittany pardons. From the end of March to the beginning of November you can always find a foire in the city or the suburbs. They are held out of doors, generally in the center of a boulevard. Some of them are important institutions. In the business foires you range from scrap-iron, old clothes and nicked china and disreputable furniture at the Porte Saint-Ouen and on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir to the costliest Paris has to offer on the Esplanade des Invalides and building materials and engines in the Tuileries. The purely amusement foires on the Quai d'Orsay, the Boulevard de Clichy, and at Saint-Cloud stretch for blocks and are attended by all Paris. To go to them is the thing to do.

But each quarter has its foire, underwritten by the shop-keepers and cafÉ proprietors of the neighborhood. They are never widely heralded, you stumble upon them by chance. And if you want to see real Paris the little foires give you the closest glimpse it is possible to get of Paris at play. At the foires de quartier there are no onlookers. Everybody is taking part. If you do not feel the impulse to get on the merry-go-round, the dipping boats, the scenic-railway; if you are averse to having your fortune told; if you feel doubtful of your ability to throw a wooden ring around the neck of a bottle of champagne; if you are indifferent to the mysteries of the two-headed calf and the dancing cobra; if your stomach does not digest pain d'Épice and candy made of coal-tar; if you think your baby ought not to have a rubber-doll or a woolly lamb or a jumping rabbit made of cat's fur—for heaven's sake stay away from the foires!

Most of the neighborhood foires are held in June. Whatever direction you take for your evening walk, your ears will give you a goal towards which to work. The merry-go-rounds have the same class of music as in America, and the tricks of the barkers—their figures of speech even—are the same. But the difference between our amusement parks and the Paris foires is the spontaneous atmosphere of the foires, their setting improvised in the midst of the city, and the amazing childlike quality of the fun. Seven or seventy, you enjoy the wooden horses just as much. And there is no dignity to lose. You do not care a bit if your cook sees you wildly pushing a fake bicycle or standing engrossed in the front row of the crowd watching a juggler.

The glorious days of June, when we put work deliberately out of our scheme of things, furnish opportunities for excursions of a different character than those of Sunday. At the risk of being ridiculed again by my critic, who has read my praise of repos hebdomadaire, I must confess that Sunday has its drawbacks. The whole city is out on Sunday, and every place is crowded. Your good time is somewhat marred all day long by the anticipation of the crowded trains and trams, for a place in which you wait with much less equanimity than when you left home in the morning. On week days there are no waits and plenty of room. I can entice my husband from his work—if it is June!

It is surprising how far afield it is possible to go at little drain on your strength and pocket-book on a June week-day. We wanted just the country sometimes. Then it was the valley of Chevreuse, Villers-Cotteret, luncheon in a tree at Robinson, or the Marne between Meaux and ChÂteau-Thierry. On a very bright day one could choose the shade of CompiÈgne, Chantilly, Rambouillet, Versailles, Marly, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Cloud, Fountainebleau, forests and parks incomparable. Cathedral-hungry or in a mood for the past, Amiens, Beauvais, Evreux, Dreux, OrlÉans, Mantes, Chartres, Sens, Troyes, Rheims, Laon, Soissons, Noyon, and Senlis are from one to three hours by train. A good luncheon at little cost is always easily found. And after lunch you have no difficulty in getting a cocher to take you to the ruins of a castle or abbey for a few francs.

Inexhaustible as is the banlieue of Paris you are always glad to get back. From whatever direction you return, the first you see of the great city is the Eiffel Tower. It beckons you back to the spell of June—in Paris.