HOW FRANCE LIVES

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 31, 6 August 1934, Page 9

HOW FRANCE LIVES

FRIVOLOUS ONCE MORE

THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT

CHANGES PROMISED

VTe who have lived through this reStli'ss winter, with its changes of Government, its street riots, its wild talk of ievolution and dictatorship, are- still finding it hard,to bclievo'that Paris is "back to normal." Perhaps those of us who read too many papers and talk politics from morning till night are finding it particularly hard to imagine that Paris can be interested in many things Other than politics, writes the Paris correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian." Three weeks after .February o—that is, long before things had calmed down in Paris—l was crossing the- Place do I'Opera ono night when I saw many hundreds of people standing in front of the Opera building. For days the Place de I'Opera had been a centre of street disturbances, and my first thought was "Here we are! Another riot!" In reality the people outside the Opera were merely there to see the arrival of, M. » Lebrun and M. Doumergue at the Bal des Petits Lits Blancs.(the great charity ball of the year) and to have a look at the fashionable evening frocks of the "best people" who attend such affairs. It seemed incrediblo that at a time when the quarrels in Paris over the causes of February 6 wero almost as violent as the liots themselves; when Stavisky still continued to fill five pages of every newspaper, and when the Third Republic seemed to be on its last legs, I hero should be people still able to lake an interest in evening frocks and in charity balls with their "all-star" programmes'. DRESS AND THE CRISIS. Aud even today, when we are beginning to find life too short to read the daily reports of the Stavisky Committee of Inquiry, and when things are "definitely" beginning to look normal again, we are inclined to condemn the frivolity of tho people who get excited over the Davis Cup, or about the Grandes Fetes de Paris; and we feel like scoffing at that committee of Fronch aristocrats who, in the name of the luxury trades and iu the name of economic recovery, have declared war on the dinner-jacket. "Decent people must wear full evening dress." One feels that their economics are not altogether unlike those of the young eighteenth-century marquise who, being told of tho coming famine, declared that if there were no bread one could always eat brioches. Here are people laying down the law :>bout dinner-jackets when Hitler is at the door, when young France is in a state of mental fermentation, when the membership of the Fascist and Royalist, leagues is increasing by loaps and bounds, with 80,000 young men—so we are told—ready to march any day on the Chamber of Deputies, and when Marcel Deat is prophesying a change of regime; what;a crowning event for (he Grandes Fetes do Paris! On that day the young generation will snatch th*-rein's of power, from the shaky hands of tho "old fogies." A joke of Berlin origin is now wideiy circulated in France: "Why is France ruled by ..Id men of seventy-five1?" Answer: "Because the men of eighty are dead." THE GREAT MONTH. Many great things, M. Dcat says, Ji:tve happened in France in July. The capture of the Bastille was in July; and so were the "trois glorieusos"---t he .three glorious days of the Romantic Revolution of 1830, which brought to i ho throne the most unromantie oi France's forty kings, Louis-Philippe, the man with the umbrella. - But there ■were no train?, ho cheap recursions, no motor buses either in 1789 or in 1830; and today, we aro told, there 5s no need to worry about July; for after the'Grandes Fetes de Paris everybody will be busy packing his trunks to go to the sea, or.into the mountains, or to uncle's farm in tho Aube or the Aude. It may bo so. ; In any case, if one is to deal with certainties and not merely with possibilities, the great event of the near future will not be a revolution, but the Kemaine de Paris, the Grandes Fetes <[b Paris, which will last, in fact, not t.no week, but three weeks. . On the Seine, -which has now lost for ever its little steamboats, the bateaux-mouehos, which Flaubert and Maupassant loved, we are promised • boat-races; we are also promised horse-races at Longchamp, and a boxing match between Marcel Thil and Len Harvey; an international fencing tournament, and a fete of French and foreign military bands in the Tuileries Gardens; there will be garden parties, and many fetes de l'elegance; a Maurice Ravel festival at the Opera, and a gala performance of '' Coriolanus" at the Comcdie Francais —the very "Coriolanus?' which caused the police so much trouble iu February, when crowds of young men from the Action Franoaise would insist on acclaiming Shakespeare as an enemy of M. Chautemps. TOR LAFAYETTE. And there is going to be a Centenary Exhibition of Lafayette, which will help American visitors to forget M. Barthou's broadcast which never reached America; instead of hearing "M. Barthou speaking from his desk at the Quai d'Orsay" they heard an idiotic voice saying "Won't you kiss me, darling?" The wireless people are still looking for this practical joker in the hope of boiling him alive. Chaliapine .will sing; and the Rip Revue at the Theatre Michel, which contains so many good jokes about Stavisky and the deputies, will be brought specially up to date. Nor will there be a lack of art exhibitions; "The Passion and Crucifixion in French Art" at the -Sainto Chapelle; "French painters in Italy" at the Pavilion de Marsan. The interminable Salons and many ■ smaller exhibitions '■will still be open, and there will even be a special Centenary Exhibition in honour of Jacquard, the man who invented the loom which saved the silk industry of Lyons and in whose honour a 40c 'postage stamp has just been, issued; it is the first engraved (and very finely engraved) low-value stamp in France, and worthy companion to ihc engraved pictorial stamp of higher value. When will a benefactor of the •textile industry in England, receive the same distinction?