1936 On the Continent

bridge like a note of exclamation. Pause beside this note of exclamation and glance across at the Cité. You will obtain a back view of Notre Dame that is known to few people. Then you will see a few trees, with one foot in the water, so to speak, and bare or in flower or in leaf according to the season. You will also see a few people standing on the quay and apparently angling, but in reality they are merely gazing into the air and reflecting what sort of
apéritif
they are going to drink. These are no “sights”; they are simple things—a few trees on the edge of the water, a man who appears to be angling, and perhaps also a barge with red and green stern lights floating down the Seine, apparently with a cargo—but all this, set in the blue-grey light of sundown, is like a Cézanne come to life, and more truly Paris than all the great boulevards, to which the true Parisian strays as rarely as a true Seine fish on to the hook.
Architecture
    But enough about the light. Those who have eyes to see will see it, and those who fail to experience it are in any case hopeless. Nor is it our intention to take up your time with the
architecture
of Paris. All you wish to know about Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance styles or about Florentine influence, you can learn from your Baedeker. There is only
one
observation we wish to make concerning the general architectural character of the streets of Paris, to wit, our discovery that the reason you feel so “homey” in the streets of Paris is the fact that they have
walls
. Naturally, this refers to the average Paris street, composed of average houses, and not to the few reinforced concrete exceptions in the city. These
street walls
, that is to saythe perspectively closed and wonderfully soothing view of the façades, arises from the fact that all the houses have high
porte-fenêtres
that end level with the ground. The
porte-fenêtres
have low iron railings running horizontally along the entire frontage and often shaped into a continuous series of very narrow balconies. There are no projecting balconies, no disturbing unevenness. This unbroken horizontal line produces that severely harmonious, perspectively soothing impression of the streets that every foreigner senses, without recognising the cause of the mellow, homey feeling that comes over him while strolling in the streets of Paris. The nature of the building material also contributes in a great measure to this pleasant impression; most Paris houses are built of a sort of limestone, and this assumes that wonderful silver-grey to grey-black patina that is the characteristic colouring of the city.
Romantic Garrets
    Then, of course, there are the famous mansards, gables and chimneys which, in the upper regions, burst the severe harmony of the street scene with a crazy pattern of zigzags and tapers. Mimi Pinson and the impecunious poet of the garret room have long been dead, but the architectural garret romanticism, the Baroque paradise of the poor tenant, is immortal, like the name of Francois Mansart, who invented this charmingly crazy idea of living in sooty pigeon lofts.
    And so we come to the remarkable species of humanity that inhabits this city, to wit, the native Parisian.
    There are two categories of native Parisians. The first category is composed of hotel porters, maître d’hôtels, taxi-drivers, dealers in luxury goods, etc.; these live for and by the foreigner and belong to that international bastard tribe that the tourist often confuses with the true native, which is, of course, just as wrong as to judge the true Londoner by the standard of the Savoy or the Cumberland. The second category, the
true
Parisian, is just as unique as the city in which he lives; it is he—and above all
she
—who gives Paris its characteristic, living impress.
    The most peculiar and at the same time the most typical thing about the life of the Parisian is the fact thatit represents a superficially improbable mixture of laziness and industry, an idyllic, countrified quality and city-bred sophistication, a love of pleasure and pedantry. All these contrasts are represented more completely and unostentatiously in a greengrocer’s shop in the 16th or 18th
arrondissement
than in a hundred novels. Here is a warrant for the 100 per cent. Parisian
petit bourgeois
, and the longer you know him the more will you agree that the description in the warrant fits him.
Wanted for Inspection: Man Who
    1. Loves good food, good drink, bad music, bad