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
Miss Rose Ghorayeb concludes her delightful account of her impressions during her recent journey to France