1936 On the Continent

establishments of their
quartier
, or try, in a touchingly comic manner, to get off with the governesses in the Luxembourg.
The Garden of Romance
    The Luxembourg Garden! If you carefully avoid the sometimes abominable statues and plaster casts, you will see many delightful idyllic things. There is, for instance, the big pool where the children sail their wonderfully well-rigged ships. The sailing ships are hired by governesses and mothers at 3 francs per hour from the “Admiral,” a lame ex-soldier of the Great War. Naturally, the adults derive more enjoyment from this game than the children. They stand round the pool and exchange expert remarks about tacking, port side and lee side, the force of the wind and tacking. The children themselves are fairly blasé and one is inclined to suspect that they are only engaging in the show for the benefit of their elders. Then there are those famous old gentlemen with their croquet games. They have their own playground and no one under fifty is allowed to join in the game. Most members wear beards and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. They never cease quarrelling but only come to blows very occasionally, and they are masters of croquet. There is also a “Long Thumbs” club, membership of which is similarly confined to gentlemen of mature years. They play a sort of tennis with a high net, featherweight balls and enormously long rackets, the rules of which are a mystery to all but themselves. The game is not played anywhere else in the world, though experts assert that this comic sport is the ancestor of tennis. The famous Guignol is a puppet show, where the children take their elders as a reward for good behaviour. Then there are the three famous goats, with their gay bells, on which children from three years upwards can have a ride. However, as far as the students are concerned the chief attraction of the Luxembourg are the governesses and the girl students. It is amusing to watch the tragi-comedies that take place here at every turn, when, for instance, a pretty girl sits down on a hired chair and is within five minutes surrounded by earnest-looking young men.
    Close to the
Quartier
lies the thirteenth
arrondissement
, which is partly (round the Place d’Italie) purely proletarian, but has small islands of art, such as the Boulevard Arago, where there are many cheap studios to let.
The Chelsea of the World
    If we continue, still in a clockwise direction, we now come to the Montparnasse, which is also a centre for artists and foreigners in Paris. The heart of Montparnasse is the corner by the Métro Vavin, with the famous cafés Cupole and Dôme (the third of these famous cafés, the Rotonde, closed its doors in 1935). The more outlying parts of the fourteenth and fifteenth
arrondissements
are mainly inhabited by the lower middle class, but there are a large number of new buildings here which, particularly round the Porte d’Orleans and the Porte de Versailles, have developed into strongholds of the foreign element. Farther out, on both sides of the Porte d’Orleans, and round the very lovely Parc de Montsouris, an entirely new town has grown up—the Cité Universitaire, in which many countries and French provinces have erected veritable palaces for their students; a second, new Quartier Latin, though for the present lacking in colour and tradition.
    If we return to the inner belt, we will find that here too, on the left bank of the river, the city becomes more “middle class” the farther west we go. The Boulevard St. Germain and its immediate vicinity, in particular, are famous for their patrician palaces. Close to this district are the political and diplomatic quarters of Paris, centring in the Chambres de Deputés and the Quai d’Orsay. The “Institut de France,” stronghold of the “forty immortals,” is also here, embodying (and perhaps also ossifying) the oldest French tradition and attracting both admiration and ridicule. For the Academy of the Immortals has long ceased to represent the intellectual flower of the nation, and its cult of tradition has to a considerable extent degenerated into a conservatively reactionary mentality.
The “Right People”
    Our circular tour has brought us to the Seine once more. We see before us the vast area of the Eiffel Tower,the Champs de Mars and the Dôme of the Invalides, a very modern upper middle-class district. But if we cross the Seine we shall be entirely in the realm of the upper middle class, among the