Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/687



September-October, 1923

ARIS will be the only thing missing from this Paris Letter. Where is Paris? Among those houses with closed shutters (those dear shutters which make us to feel sad abroad without knowing why, until the day we become aware that what we miss are the shutters, the window's wings). In the deserted Champs Elysées auto-cars run by the American Express Company stop in front of the Grand Palais—which makes us regret that France isn't a country of earthquakes—a guide gets up on the seat and threatens the monument with his finger, in a foreign tongue. Thirty-three travellers with eye-glasses listen to him in consternation, and the auto-car continues toward the Invalides. We hear no more the courteous articulated idiom, rich in nasal and metallic tones, which is called the French language. It is summer in Paris.

Along the Lido I happily rediscovered a goodly section of Paris. In the cave of the hotel on the Adriatic, transformed into a mediaeval tavern in the style of the Place Pigalle, a certain number of my "acquaintances" whom I am accustomed to see, fully dressed, if not in respectable places, at least at the Boeuf sur le Toit or, in Montparnasse, at the Caméléon, were lunching naked, with Turkish towel dressing-gowns wrapped around their sunburnt torsos. I was quite tired for I had spent a good part of the night in a vain search for one of your editors; but he had not returned to his hotel (which explains a letter I received in Constantinople from him fifteen days later, asking me "why don't you write some Venetian nights?" Thank Heaven I escaped that sombre reef). I wanted to lunch alone. But Mrs G. A saw me and invited me to her table. She was dressed in white stockings, the upper half of a pair of pyjamas, and a yellow parasol across her shoulder like a shotgun. The lower half of the same pyjamas (which smelled of cold opium) she had lent to one of her friends whose dark glasses prevented me from seeing her eyes, but whose mouth was so red that I found everything she said most intelligent. She asked me what I thought of the art of portraiture in Venetian painting.