It Isn't Saddening To Leave Paris Today

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30348, 25 January 1964, Page 11

It Isn't Saddening To Leave Paris Today

[By

STEPHANIE GERVIS,

in the "Sydney Morning Herald." Reprinted by arrangement}

DARIS today is a melancholy city. It strikes you most when you leave. The only sad thing about leaving is that it isn’t.

When we first got here six months ago we had the feeling of going in the wrong direction. Nearly everyone we met was leaving. Paris these days is a city not only to get away to, but from.

Artists and writers, particularly, are going and going gladly. They are going to Ibiza, to Barcelona, to the Spanish east coast and across the Mediterranean to Tangier. They are going to places where they can keep warm, places they can afford.

Housing in Paris is critical. Most apartments have to be bought. The cheapest going price we have yet heard is £A9OO for one narrow room with a sink and stove, no shower, and' a hole in the floor down the

hall for a toilet. And as a rule, a 50 per cent cash payment is required before you can move in. One couple paid £ A 3,150 for one room without plumbing and a private kitchen across a public hallway. For an artist just coming to town, finding a studio is an art itself. Many of the choicest studios with the best light have been converted into very posh apartments for the very rich. Parents who remember Paris in the “good old days” and try to convince their children that it would still be here for them don’t realise that they are suffering from lingering Rip Van Winkleism.

Not only the cost of living but also the standard of living is going up. France’s new prosperity, planned under the Fourth Republic, is booming under the Fifth. Although the Frenchman is still mightily suspicious of credit, many, impatient with saving up for one item at a time, are venturing into instalment buying. The number of car-owners is quadrupling. Poor Richer I have seen more and biggeir jewels, more custommade clothes, professional coiffures, and expensive accessaries on women in Paris than in London, New York, or even Miami Beach. The poor are getting a little richer the rich look no poorer, and all the middle-class seems to have lost are their status symbols—servants, and vacations the lower classes, until now, could not afford. Now one-time servants make more money in factories and vacation at the same resorts with their former employers. This is one of the most laudable results of the new boom, but one which the middle-class likes least. And all of this could and should be a good thing, if only the French had been able to learn something from societies older in their affluence. But they seem just as mesmerised by the newness of it ail and just as eager to make the same mistakes.

Same Mistakes With the exception of the farmers, whose overabundant harvests have rewarded them with plummeting prices and driven them to violent demonstrations, the legendary French virtues of individuality, political protest, and public disputation seem blinded by the new golden glare of prosperity. And as long as de Gaulle will give them more, they will respond to him. As long as he goes on appealing to their national sense of superiority and exclusiveness with visions of France taking her rightful place as a first-rate Power at the head of a third (European) Power bloc, they will go on saying yes to him and his force de frappe. In this country of political

rebelliousness with its hundreds of thousands of Socialists, not until this year did a peace' movement strong enough to be heard begin raising its voice. And in this “cradle of liberty and birthplace of the rights of man,”

as Frenchmen ■ are wont to refer to their country, if a man is merely suspected of being a national security risk lie can be arrested without charges and kept incommunicado, unable even to contact a lawyer, for 15 days. At the time of the Algerian trouble a peaceful demonstration by Algerians was broken up by riot police swinging their lead-lined capes while Parisians stood in doorways and blocked the paths of escaping Algerians. There were some protests in those days, from Jeanson, Sartre, Beauvoir, and the others who signed the “Manifesto of the 121.” But few Frenchmen joined them. Losing Vigour If France is getting politically flabby, its creative vigour is not faring much better. One recently arrived young American painter sighed for the neuroses of New York. “Nobody in Paris is looking over your shoulder to see what you’re doing. No one bothers to put you down. No one cares. It’s good to get away from the pleasure, but much more is happening in New York. I came here to relax.” , Another painter, a respected hangover from the fifties, who was quoted in those days on the virtues of Paris as a place to create, stared dejectedly into bis sweet French beer and pronounced Paris “dead.” Even a vested interest like Marcel Mithois, literary editor of “Realite,” admits that the talented young French writers have nothing to say. In the world of theatre Beckett, Genet, and lonesco have been institutionalised. As for the cafes, the terraces of the Deux Magots and Cafe Flore are adorned with chic Parisiennes in Chanel suits and Charles of the Ritz coiffures. A pair of sandals is enough to send the whole place into a scandalised twitter. Cafe Life The closest fascimile to Paris’s legendary cafe life poses along Boulevard du Montparnasse at places like La Coupole or the Select or the Dome. Artiste gather there, but more to see and be seen than to trade ideas, argue, or get drunk. Even the wide-eyed, wildmaned young men who come here to find PARIS, themselves, LIFE, and James Dean seem to sense that something is missing. The virtually impregnable salons undoubtedly offer more. But even junketing intellectuals with a command of French and entree into the more rarefied circles here are, more and more, eager to get to London—or back to New York—for a good conversation. Even tourists are becoming disenchanted with this city of legendary enchantment. There was no April in Paris this year, or May, June, July, or August, for that matterjust one long dreary December drizzle for all seasons.

(The Jeweller’s Window appears on Page 10.)