In the World of Tourism... Paris, City of Learning

Paris is not only the city of amusement and night cabarets; it is also the city of learning and art, the seedbed of the schools of philosophy, art, and literature — such as Symbolism, Surrealism, and Existentialism — and the haunt of their leaders and prophets, who distribute their ideas to the whole world. There I visited the "Autumn Salon," where works by two thousand one hundred and fifty-seven contemporary painters and sculptors were shown — most of them French, and some foreigners come from every part of the world to exhibit their works in Paris. My eyes grew weary from gazing, and my feet from walking, in the galleries of the "Grand Palais," which had been turned into an exhibition hall.

In Paris there are thirty-six institutes of higher and professional education, apart from the colleges, secondary schools, primary schools, and others. The most famous is the Sorbonne, a university comprising the Faculty of Letters, the Faculty of Sciences, and the Practical Institute for Higher Studies. Paris holds fifty thousand university students alone, apart from the secondary and primary pupils; and a large portion of the students of the higher institutes are foreigners of many nationalities.

Most of the great schools cluster in the Latin Quarter, in the fifth arrondissement (for Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements), but many of them are scattered through the other quarters.

As for what they call the University City, it is a district in the fourteenth arrondissement — that is, at one edge of the city — containing a number of residences prepared for students' lodging, half of them for foreign students; it houses no more than three thousand five hundred students of the higher institutes. Among these residences is one they call the International House — that is, for all the nations represented among the students — while each of the rest belongs to one of the countries that send students to Paris. In view of the crowding of the University City with students and the severity of the housing crisis, the "National Central Committee for Public Affairs" has decided to build a new university city in a suburb facing the suburb of the first, surrounded by gardens, comprising three thousand rooms, four hundred of them for married students, and including as well restaurants, clubs, a library, a playing field, a station, and a crossing for the use of the students alone.

Everything in Paris is dear, exorbitant in price — except theater tickets, and the books and publications they issue in cheap editions, on cheap paper, and distribute to the entire world, everywhere the French language is read. In this way they spread their culture and gain a moral profit alongside the material one, for the sheer quantity of publications they distribute compensates them for the cheapness of their prices.

Apart from the schools and universities, Paris has fifty-seven museums, seventy-five theaters, and forty-three cinema houses — that is, the theaters number nearly double the cinemas, which points to the classical taste of the inhabitants. There are twenty-seven music halls, and dozens of public gardens; let us content ourselves with mentioning the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, each of which is a wide world in itself, containing lakes, zoological and botanical gardens, a racecourse, museums, and centers of amusement and sightseeing.

And Paris is still building the future, drawing up new projects of beautification and improvement, to enlarge its centers of learning and to house a greater number of students and tourists. For a rising people lives a full, three-sided life: it lives its past, its present, and its future all at once.

City of Statues and Pictures

When you wander through the cities of Italy and France, the distinguishing mark of the European city, drawn from the art and learning of the Greeks, reveals itself to you: it reveals itself in their passion for the plastic arts — that is, for the statues and pictures that copy nature and display the beauty of the gods, of man, and of animal. Before the façades of the palaces, in every square, in every public garden, at the Opera and the playhouses, the statues meet your eye — now busts, now full figures — statues of heroes and of the great men of the past, and statues of the gods and goddesses of Greece, bringing out the beauty of the naked body, or the grace of the athletic body, or the strength and nobility of the animal. Inside the churches and on their roofs and sides, especially in Italy, are statues of saints in the style of the age of the Renaissance, resembling the Greek gods with their beautiful bodies and exquisite features. The lofty ceilings of the Louvre are a gallery of colored pictures — pictures of the immortal myths of Greece, of its gods and its heroes — that distract you from looking at the Louvre's treasures and elegant canvases. There is no doubt that the statues and pictures, in their poses and the nobility of their movements, give the beholders lessons in art and gracefulness. In Italy I was struck by the number of people in whose faces and bodies the beauty of the statues is reflected. And the Parisians have, in their speech and their movements, the grace of actors and people of art.

All this stands in contrast with the art of the Arab East, which is almost devoid of painted and sculpted beauty, and confines itself to building distinguished by ornament of plant forms and geometric lines (the arabesque). As for Beirut — we set up the statue of the Martyrs, and "God spared the believers the fighting"...

The Europeans are no less greedy than the Easterners, and no less eager to hunt money from the tourists, especially after this war in which they tasted hunger and cold. But they do it with tact and art. Their prices are fixed, however high. The seller sets his prices, so there is no way to waste time in haggling, arguing, and deadly chatter...

And the tourist's personal freedom is safeguarded and respected: there is no one who stares at you long, no one who bothers you with questions, no one who says to you: Who are you? Where do you come from? What is your religion and your sect? Etc.

Among all the men and women I met, no one asked me my religious confession except a Turkish tourist and two tourists from Pakistan. So I said to myself: here is the religious mentality, one of the marks of the Easterners. They put their religion in their mouths instead of keeping it in their hearts, as Naimy said.

There is another thing that the American tourists notice, and whoever has known American civilization: France, and Europe generally, are old countries — old in their buildings, old in their monuments; they have not yet cast off the garment of age, nor do they wish to cast it off, for it is one of the sources of their charm.

There are palaces with columns and marble staircases of enormous size that have been turned into hotels or company offices; their beautiful marble does not sit well with the mechanical elevators, nor the spaciousness of their rooms and courts with the modern means of comfort and speed. I set down here some remarks of American tourists: "This hotel is beautiful to look at, but it is more like the building of a Roman tomb than of a hotel... And this huge mirror beside the enormous brass bed... no doubt it once adorned some hall of the Tuileries or of Malmaison."

One American lady tourist said to me: "In New York, screens of mesh are much used on doors and windows as protection against flies and insects; here I find no trace of them." Another said: "The French content themselves with eating meat and drinking wine, and neglect water and milk products, which are the mainstay of a healthy diet."

From these remarks I wish to arrive at the following conclusion: the Europeans have not yet reached the level of the Americans in the use of the machine and in harnessing it for man's comfort and well-being. They still run behind them in the field of applied science, such as mechanics and industrial chemistry — because they are less wealthy than they, and more deeply marked by the results of the calamitous war; and because they cling more to their old things, for the art and beauty in them. And so we see them sometimes sacrificing comfort for the sake of beauty, preferring the hand to the machine, and putting art before science and ornament before cleaning and sanitation.

The ECA, which concerns itself with promoting tourism in Europe, has taken it upon itself to transport a number of European hotel owners to visit the American hotels for six weeks, to acquaint themselves with the modern mechanical means used in kitchens, bathrooms, and cleaning equipment, so that they may set about imitating them in Europe. But the passage from old to new does not happen quickly, especially outside the great capitals.

If I may offer some remarks on the subject of tourism and summering in Lebanon, I would say: Lebanon cannot compete with Europe on the side of art, for it has none of the theaters, museums, statues, and splendid monuments that Europe has. But it can strengthen the particular monuments it does have, and the natural gifts that have no counterpart there: the shining sun, the clear sky, and the perpetual spring in the summer-resort villages — and then the low prices compared with the prices of Europe. Still, we need to improve nature and beautify it — if we cannot manage artistic production — we must undertake a wide-ranging campaign for cleanliness, and a still wider-ranging one to reforest the mountains and hills and to plant trees on the plains and plateaus. How badly the cities of the coast and its roads, the streets of Beirut and the streets of the summer-resort villages, need trees to soften the climate and ward off the heat of the sun and the blasts of the wind! Our country looks naked and bare if we set it beside the countries of Europe with their green plains and mountains.

As for the technical side, the network of roads must be completed and asphalted, above all the roads of the North, home of the Cedars and the most beautiful spot in Lebanon. The local arts must be fostered — handicraft, embroidery, weaving, and everything that bears a local color to attract the tourists, so that they may return to their countries with a few vessels and ornaments to remind them of their stay in our land. And above all this, we must carry on wide publicity abroad, in which the emigrants in the American lands and elsewhere would take part.

In Paris I saw huge billboards set up in prominent places, inviting the American tourists who fill the capital to visit Israel aboard Israeli airplanes. And among all the posters displayed everywhere, inviting people to tour various places in the world, I did not see a single one inviting them to tour Lebanon or any other country of the Arab East. When I spoke to some American lady tourists about Lebanon, one of them said: There is a country I should love to visit — though I know nothing about it, except that it is mentioned in the Bible...