1936 On the Continent

cigarettes, good clothes for women, bad clothes for men.
    2. Dawdles, loiters, loafs, seems always to be sitting at a café and doing no work whatever, yet he looks twice at a sou before he spends it, and is so capable and efficient, in an unobtrusive, un-German way, that he retires from business on the stroke of his fiftieth birthday, and buys himself a house in the country in order to devote the rest of his life to growing radishes.
    3. Practises no sports apart from reading the sports columns in the papers, leads the most unhealthy life imaginable, and lives to a ripe old age. Lives in his district as though in a village, does not go to another district for months or years, but knows Paris as well as he does his own hand. Apparently never reads a serious book, but good books in France run into umpteen editions. Has no library, the
bouquin
, printed on poor quality paper and with a yellow cover, being thrown away or sold to a dealer when done with. No living author appears in bound volumes. Culture is not a domestic decoration to be exhibited on a bookshelf, but an article of consumption.
    4. The Parisian is an individualist
in excelsis;
he lives his life in his own way, and according to his own ideas, and will have no interference from anyone. Yet there is no city in the world with a more passionate collective political sense than Paris. He hates processions and festivities of the German pattern, but when he does demonstrate he goes the limit, with a gun and barricades, as in the Sacco and Vanzetti affair on February 6th,1934, or in the case of the great Bastille gathering of the Popular Front in 1935.
    5. The Parisian, and particularly the Parisienne, drives the Freudians to despair, for they know nothing about “repressions” and “complexes.” Timidity, prudery and the inferiority complex are strangers to the Parisian. They laugh and shout and “spoon” in the underground as freely as at home. The children do their “small business” in the street—and also on picture postcards—and this is regarded as most amusing. And they say things, in good as well as in bad company, that would stagger an Englishman or a Central European. And—again—they kiss and cuddle everywhere, in the bus, at the café, in the street, and no one takes any notice. For—and this is another contrast—in spite of all his apparent frivolity and gay life the Parisian is a veritable puritan in matters relating to marriage and the family. They are exemplary fathers and mothers, and you will find that all the talk, scribbling and movie-play about
l’amour
, the cuckold and the
femme infidèle
is not meant seriously, just like the angling in the Seine.
Street Life
    The thing that leaps to the English visitor’s eye about the glamorous traits of the Parisian and his mode of life, is the fact that a good deal of the Parisian’s life takes place in the street. The terraces of the cafés with their coloured sail-cloth awnings are right in the street; you lunch at a restaurant that is half in the street; and at the
foires
(fairs), of which there is always one in one quarter or the other, the jostling crowds likewise disport themselves in the street, while on Sundays the great boulevards of the centre and the outer ring of the city are a teeming
corso
of
badauds
(loungers). And in the evening the
concierge
and the small shopkeeper place their chairs outside the front door in order to enjoy, in the form of all-pervading odours, the menu of the whole block, and to watch the cats and the mangy dogs which he loves with a tender affection. (Thoroughbred animals are an abomination to the Parisian; he regards a pedigree in animals in the same light as foppishness.)
So Retiring!
    On the whole, the true Parisian is the least known species of humanity in the whole of Europe. For he withdraws from contact with the foreigner as a snail withdraws into its shell. “My home is my castle” to-day applies far more to the French than to the English; for the apparently reserved, shy Englishman thaws up on closer acquaintance, becomes cordial and friendly and invites the stranger of yesterday to his hearth and home; whereas the apparently frank and charming Frenchman only permits the foreigner to approach up to a point, but inwardly he preserves for years a barely perceptible yet unbridgeable distance, gladly and frequently inviting a business friend or a superficial acquaintance to a restaurant, but hardly ever to his home.
    That is why it is so