Paris Vistas

Webster defines a vista as "a view, especially a distant view, through or between intervening objects." If I were literal-minded, I suppose I should either abandon my title or make this book a series of descriptions of Sacré Coeur, crowning Montmartre, as you see the church from dark gray to ghostly white, according to the day, at the end of apartment-house-lined streets from the allée of the Observatoire, from the Avenue Montaigne, from the rue de Solférino, and from the Rue Taitbout. I ought to be writing about the vistas, than which no other city possesses a more beautiful and varied array, that feature the Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadéro, the Tour Eiffel, the Grande Roue, the Invalides, the Palais Bourbon, the Madeleine, the Opéra, Saint-Augustin, Val de Grâce and the Panthéon.

But may not one's vistas be memories, with the years acting as "intervening objects"? Has not distance as much to do with time as with space? Vistas in words can no more convey the impression of things seen than Lester Hornby's sketches. If you want a substitute for Baedeker, please do not read this book! If you want a substitute for photographs, you will be disappointed in Lester's sketches.

The monuments of Paris, ticketed by name and historical events to tourists whose eyes have had hardly more time than the camera, known by photographs to prospective tourists who dream of things as yet unseen, are interwoven into the canvas of my life. The Gare Saint-Lazaire, for instance, is the place where I was lost once as a kid, where I have had to say goodbye to my husband starting on a long and perilous journey, and over which I have seen a Zeppelin floating. Since Louis Philippe was long before my time, the obelisk always has been in the Place de la Concorde. And when you pass it, your eyes, meeting the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysées, the Carrousel at the end of the Tuileries, the Madeleine at the end of the Rue Royale and the Palais Bourbon at the end of the bridge, record vistas as natural, as familiar as your mother's face in the doorway of the childhood home. Where else could the Arc de Triomphe be? Of course it looks like that!

I shall not attempt to apologize for the autobiography that comes to the front in my Paris vistas. Perhaps my own insignificance and unimportance and the lack of interest on the part of the public in what I do and think--impressed upon me by more than one critic of earlier volumes--should deter me from telling how I lived and brought up my family in Paris. But it is the only way I can tell how I feel about Paris. Whether the end justifies the means the reader must decide for himself.

H. D. G.

Paris, August, 1919.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(1887-1888)

CHAPTER PAGE

I CHILDHOOD VISTAS 3

(1899)

II AT SIXTEEN 15

(1908)

III A HONEYMOON PROMISE 31

(1909-1910)

IV THE PROMISE FULFILLED 41

V THE PENSION IN THE RUE MADAME 51

VI LARES AND PENATES IN THE RUE SERVANDONI 63

VII GOLD IN THE CHIMNEY 76

VIII AT THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE 86

IX EMILIE IN MONOLOGUE 97

X HUNTING APACHES 104

XI DRIFTWOOD 112

XII SOME OF OUR GUESTS 119

XIII WALKS AT NIGHTFALL 132

XIV AFTER-DINNER COFFEE 142

XV REPOS HEBDOMADAIRE 148

XVI "MANY WATERS CANNOT QUENCH LOVE" 154

XVII REAL PARIS SHOWS 167

XVIII THE SPELL OF JUNE 181

(1913)

XIX CHILDHOOD VISTAS FOR A NEW GENERATION 193

XX THE PROBLEM OF HOUSING 201

(1914)

XXI "NACH PARIS!" 211

(1914-1916)

XXII AT HOME IN THE WHIRLWIND 223

XXIII SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS 231

XXIV UNCOMFORTABLE NEUTRALITY 243

(1917)

XXV HOW WE KEPT WARM 253

XXVI APRIL SIXTH 262

XXVII THE VANGUARD OF THE A. E. F. 269

(1918)

XXVIII THE DARKEST DAYS 277

XXIX THE GOTHAS AND BIG BERTHA 294

XXX THE BIRD CHARMER OF THE TUILERIES 307

XXXI THE QUATORZE OF TESTING 313

XXXII THE LIBERATION OF LILLE 321

XXXIII ARMISTICE NIGHT 326

XXXIV ROYAL VISITORS 341