My Observations in Paris

...the customs for you, then delivers you by private car to a hotel that assures your comfort and prepares you to take in what you are to see and do in the days ahead. Such was our case with the University Tourism Office — no sooner had we settled in at the Hotel Marseille than our guide had distributed to us the program of our sixteen-day stay in the French lands. This guide, and others in Grenoble and Lyon, were university people, sure of their information and ready for the questions of fellow university people. And in every town we visited, the tourism office presented us with a special booklet about it: the places a tourist would delight in visiting, with pictures of these places and historical commentary on them. A valuable arrangement in the art of tourism and summering.

And here we were in Paris! We opened our eyes wide, searching for the expected marvel. In truth, Paris does not look beautiful from the direction of the Gare de Lyon, and its houses are old and black. On the evening of our arrival I put in the mail a card to a friend of mine in Beirut, in which I told her: I have just arrived in Paris and I still see Beirut as the queen of beauty. Wait until I see the inside of it — yet a thrill ran through everyone, and their voices rose in Maurice Chevalier's song: Paris, I love you.

I tell you truly that I was astounded when I came to know Paris later on, for I had not believed it held all this depth. I had thought it meant seeing the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, and the adornments of fashion — I envied Paris the astonishment it produced in me, and I wished there were in the Arab lands a city that could produce a reaction like this. There is a museum for everything in Paris, for all the sciences of the earth: for nature, for modern inventions and theories; a museum for the animals of land and sea; museums for the ancient, medieval, and modern arts; museums for costume and for historical events;

museums for coins, for books, for weapons, for heroes and for children — two months would be too short for you if you wished to see them all. And how fortunate are the children and schoolchildren of Paris in these laboratories!

Then there is the planning of Paris, its trees and its man-made forests, its streets, their numbering and their maps — to say nothing of its fast underground train. Together they make of Paris an orderly anthem, harmonious in its strains. These broad streets, designed three hundred and fifty years ago, show you how this people looked upon its public affairs. Look at the straight line from the Champs-Élysées to the Place de l'Étoile to the Tuileries to the Concorde, and follow this street and see how its straightness continues very far, all the way to Neuilly. Was there not, one wonders, a single man of influence, with his interests and his friendships in high places, to bend this line away from the front of his garden??

These monuments — at the Sorbonne, in the Place de l'Étoile, at Napoleon's tomb — how important they are artistically and how delicious historically. On the façade of the Panthéon — the burial place of heroes — they have written: "To those who died for the homeland, France acknowledges her debt." A small plaque on blackened, unattractive stones that makes death seem dear to you...

Talk of Paris runs on and on if we wish to speak of every single thing by itself. Since I am being brief, I feel I must inform my gracious readers that this winter's colors are blue and cognac, and its fabrics rough and napped; accordingly we shall not be changing these coats of ours while they are still new... Then let me counsel whoever goes to Paris not to forget a visit to the Opéra, and to look closely at every statue seated upon its walls, to learn the history of art, music, and the theater, and to see the art of sculpture at its most finished; the magnificence of its interior, too, is a thing that fills the eye. Let him give the Louvre Museum at least two full days of his time, and visit the palaces of Versailles and the Museum of Modern Art near the Pont Alexandre III.

I had often heard people speak of the "Folies Bergère" in Paris with a certain reticence. I went there with my companions for the sake of knowing the thing at first hand. The place is an ordinary hall, nothing like the Opéra — but in acting and revues it surpasses it in polish, I believe. Theatrical art appears in its most splendid guise on the stage of the Folies Bergère. The acting harmonizes with the staging so marvelously that the subject loses its importance, because you are drawn off to the details of the piece's construction. Take, for example, the scene of a real lake on the stage, in which the heroine drowns as she dances for love before its naked bronze image set up in the middle of the lake. The statue moves, life creeps into it, and it plunges in after the heroine, splashing water over the stage with its dive, to come up with the heroine a quarter of an hour later, alive and well; the scene vanishes in the space of five seconds to make way for the scene of Paris by night, to which the naked dancer dances with the music and the acting, so that her nakedness does not surprise you. The general atmosphere there may encourage this way of seeing: the wearing of the "maillot," the "bikini," and the like softens your astonishment at what you had supposed confined to the casino and the dance halls.

I was told that in the month of August there were about a million tourists in Paris. And indeed we heard in France the languages of the earth — English, German, Italian, Turkish, and so on... though what we heard most was French. Most of the places of amusement have their programs arranged to suit the tastes of the tourists, not of the country's inhabitants — except that in France, from what I saw, they do not cater to the tourists' tastes in the matter of domestic cleanliness.

In general, I would liken Paris to a display window, or to a salon lady forever awaiting visitors — and it seems that every individual in it works to show it off as it should be shown. The gardens are forever in bloom, because the municipality attends to arranging the flowers each season requires, pulling out the wilted to plant the flowering at once. The municipal engineer makes sure of the planting of trees and prevents their cutting. Mr. Khunshat, counselor of the Saudi Legation, told me that they were delayed about two months in the building of the legation on account of a single tree they were obliged to cut down, while the municipal engineer stalled over the felling permit and begged them to spare it, as a mother begs that her son be spared a sentence of death.

This true civic feeling deserves imitation and esteem!!

As for the high cost of living in France — ask, and hear plenty. It drags along with it people's attempts to earn in every conceivable way. The "baksheesh" is everywhere, and it brings with it the impudence of the one who demands it. The lady showed me to my seat in the theater and said: where is my fee? "Et le service, Madame?" The driver brought me to the hotel and shouted at me because I had not gotten the money ready before the taxi stopped, and because the place was very near. I asked to have the salon lit so that I might receive my guests, and the hotel proprietor forbade me to light it before the visitors arrived — and he stipulated that they not stay up too late...