1936 On the Continent

at the Porte de Clignancourt, you will find the famous “Flea Market,” with which we will deal in greater detail farther on.
    And the centre, the heart of the city, the quarter situated round the Opera?
    During our circular tour we have been travelling round this quarter without touching it. And, in fact, the City of Paris, in spite of its monumental historical buildings—Louvre, Palais Royal, the Opera, the Madeleine, Pont Neuf, Place Vendôme, etc.—has become the most un-Parisian portion of this wonderful city. Except for the buildings, everything is here intended for foreigners and by foreigners. And with the exception of the small streets between the Bourse and the Halls, the febrile, pulsating life of the centre is an undigested foreign body in the real Paris. The great boulevards—Md. Madeleine, Italiens and Capucines—are, despite their strident, excited turmoil, just as colourless and tiresome as Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin or the Kärntnerstrasse in Vienna.
    So we repeat our advice—if you really wish to know Paris go to the native quarters. The central parts of all great cities in the world increasingly tend to assume the same dreary metropolitan character; they appear like the tedious, over-technical reflection of the metropolis of the future, somewhat, like Everytown in Mr. H. G. Wells’s film or, more horrific still, like the penetration or the dreadful thing called Americanism.
Small Pleasures
    Of all the arts that thrive in Paris one has attained the highest perfection—the art of idleness. In no other city in the world are such varied, subtle and strenuous methods of idleness practised as in Paris. For real idleness is a difficult business demanding knowledge and experience. But with the Parisian this cheerful art is innate. Thegeographical scene for the practice of this art is the café.
    There are many kinds of cultivated idleness and many kinds of cafés. What they all have in common is a certain railway waiting-room aspect, with long upholstered seats along the walls and narrow avenues of chairs. The rainbow colours of apéritifs and liqueurs behind the desk also represent a common feature. So does a certain easy arrogance of the waiters, the acute discomfort of the seating and the extreme cheeriness of the atmosphere. Again, typical of them all are the small saucers marked with the price of the refreshments served, from which the visitor may build pretty castles, rising to various heights according to the number of drinks consumed by him.
    The hours of the café and of the sacred idleness of which they are the scene, are evenly distributed. Shortly before 12 midday is the time for the apéritif, while shortly after 1 o’clock begins the hour of the after-dinner coffee. The “hour” lasts till 3 or 4 o’clock. But 5 o’clock is already the time for the evening apéritif, which lasts till 7, and 9 o’clock sees the commencement of night business at the café. You will observe how strenuous idleness can be.
    In the warm season people sit on the terrace of the café, which is designed to impede pedestrian traffic as much as possible and therefore occupies half the pavement. In the cold season the big cafés have brasiers on their terraces. There is a terrific stench of coal gas, which naturally adds to the cheeriness of the atmosphere.
Café Life
    There are various types of cafés. There are, in the first place, the vast luxury establishments of the Champs Elysées, like Triomph, Colisée, Select, etc.; then the famous Weber in the Rue Royale, which is the rendezvous of the business world; the noisy big cafés along the Grandes Boulevards, like Maxeville, Madrid, and all the rest, where at the time of the evening apéritif there are crowds of unescorted young ladies, so that the innocent foreign visitor may quite easily find himself arriving alone and departing
à deux
. On the Boulevard St. Michel are the big students’ cafés Capoulade, Dupont-Latin, etc., which we have already mentioned in another connection. OnMontparnasse there are the Dôme, Coupole, Napoli, Paillette and other cafés which were formerly the meeting-places of artists from all over the world, but are to-day the haunts of sham Bohemians who would like to be taken for artists, though they have nothing in common with real artists beyond their impecuniosity. But these are merely signboards rather than real Parisian cafés. The cafés round the Place Clichy, the Place Blanche and the Place