Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 305, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1917 — THE GRACES of WAR TIME PARIS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE GRACES of WAR TIME PARIS

HAVE you ever looked Into a woman’s soul when her eyes wore a veil of sad tears and brave laughter? That is Paris just now, after three years of war sorrow and war triumph, writes James Milne in the Graphic. She has let sore tears fall, but, like the tears which make pearls, they begin to shine in the sun of assured victory. Paris puts her trials behind her, resolute that they are over and must be forgotten. She lets the smiles of a naturally merry heart light the road before her, knowing how to play the heroine in these great days, as she played them in the great days of old. “Paris vaut bien une inesse 1” said Henri Quatre. If he came back to her from the royal shades, he would think her worth many masses. Perhaps one knows a French lady who, in her elegant self, seems to incarnate War-Paris. She will wear black for somebody heroically dead, or in tribute to the nation’s “lost legion,” who are not. really lost, only gone before to prepare the way of a touch of white somewhere to lighten the black, as the sun breaks through clouds into a clear sky. Maybe she has been nursing, this French Iddy, ever since the war began. But there is no weariness in her bright eyes, no forgetfulness of the art, simple, subtle, instinctive, with which the French woman wears her clothes. You sympathetically ask for tales of tragedy begotten in her circle by the'hard excursions of Armageddon. She bends her head reverently, a flash in her face, and tells you the latest good story of inimitable Monsieur Poilu. Women Capable and Serious.

That, if you please, is Madame Paris, as you meet her in Boulevard and Bois, a woman who mourns for the departed, but in the cause of their departure finds a new moral inspiration. You understand her and salute her, In maid, wife and widow. How capable they are, how serious, how detached, to all appearance, from the frills and furbelows of the woman’s life as we used to regard it. But they remain complete women, with a coquettish response for a compliment, if it be delicate enough. Even Charles Edward Stuart, ancient bachelor as he is, Philistine as he fondly thinks himself to be, takes off his hat to the Parislenne in this war time. He is a dear friend of ours, he lives in Old Paris, just as the young pretender might have done, up a winding oak staircase so dark that the concierge gives you a candle to light it, and that is why we add a word to his rightful name and call him Charles Edward Stuart. “Yes,” says he, “the Parislenne is at least as fine as the Parisian under the war ordeal, some might say finer, a better mettle of the French pasture. She is a consoling force, at a high surge like this, of the fascinating and repulsive, mysterious and commonplace, awful and trivial life in which, God knows why, perhaps, we have been pitched for a few moments.” In Old Paris.

When a new book appears, read an old one when you want to understand the spirit of today’s Paris, go down into Old Paris; so we went to St. Etienne du Mont, near the Pantheon. “We are lucky,” whispered Charles Edwmrd Stuart, as we stood within the sacred walls, “in being here under the best conditions. Look! that gleam of sun falling on the little red-robed acolyte. And the clouds of incense from his swinging censor —it Is great.” Marguerite de Valois would think so herself, and the founding of St. Etienne du Mont goes back to her. That was the old church, and a window shows the removal of the shrine of the “Sainte” to the new church. It is, you see, the Paris that the Germans wanted to loot, and they would not, like ourselves, have stayed outside the door of St. Etienne du Mont and looked across the road at the wealth of picturesque old houses. They are typical of the ancieift bridge houses, and prints show the Pont Neuf to have been bordered with these. Nor would the Huns have wandered so the Impasse des Boeufs, which looks history to the very marrow, but has none that is recoverable. -“So much the better for people of imagination," quoth Charles Edward Stuart. “Isn’t it a nice, tumbled, jumbled, dirty, fascinating place?” No more would the Huns have halted at Bouchardon’s fountain in the Rue de Grenelle, or been taken by the charming much-tummied, polyJ \

gaster’d maiden in the bas-relief, rather out of it among the rampageous boys. It was Charles Edward Stuart who said these things, adding: “I meant to write an ode to her on the plan of Keats’ ‘Grecian Ode,’ but, as I don’t quite see how to do it better, I probably shall not do it at all.” No, my Young Pretender! The Paris of history and the Paris of the war meet and become the one they have shown themselves, in a place like the College Stanislas. Its shady grounds harbored Madam du Barry and her glittering circle. Captain Guynemer, the Roland of French aviators, and General Gouraud, who was at Gallipoli, are two of its many pupils to find fame in the w.ar. But while Gouraud was perfectly disciplined, Guynemer was a rather erratic little boy who would ask questions or answer back when reprimanded. He might often have been in disgrace, if the head master had not been so fond of him. Seven or eight years ago the College Stanislas had eight members in the French academy out of the divine forty. Its roll call Includes celebrities like Anatole France, Rostand, and Henri de Regnier. Its professors, at the moment, include the Abbe Dimnet, silver-tongued and golden-hearted, a man who helps to make War-Paris rich in scholarship, as well as rich in other airs and •graces.

A Boulevard Cafe.