NINETEENTH CENTURY PARIS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3275, 20 December 1916, Page 63

NINETEENTH CENTURY PARIS.

By Edith Seable Gbossmann, M.A. In a former article I spoke of Paris as spiritually a City of the Past. Exactly what was meant is that if yon tried to penetrate below the surface and reacli the sold of the city, you turned instinctively to the memories of its wonderful bygone phases, so wonderful that they made the present seem not dead, indeed, but degenerate. There back in those other epochs lay its history, its romance, the spell it exercised over every imaginative mind; there, and not in cur days, was its undying sovereignty. It would never occur to anyone who has all doors open to him to attend a sitting of the Senate or Chamber of Deputies. If you felt any thrill hi passing the colonial offices, it was from the romance of their past; but in all probability you would leave Paris without having once thought of them. No visitor ever thought of trying to attend public functions or reviews. If by chance you catch sight of a company of the small, smart soldiers of a French regiment, you smiled—foolishly enough, as it now appears. You went to visit the monuments and relics of the Bourbon kings and the great Napoleon. It never entered your head to watch for a glimpse of the ruling President. You might even leave the city after some months' stay without know ing clearly vvno happened to be President just then. But if you went to get the. best of London, you did not trouble about its past, unless you were either a mere old fashioned sightseer or an antiquarian. The innermost fibres of London's life met on one side in the area stretching from the East Centre on through the great banking and commercial avenues to the docks, and on the other side in Westminster's "heart of hearts," St. Stephen's, Downing street, and the Colonial Offices in Northumberland avenue and Victoria street, where two valves were connected by the Strand and Fleet street. Here was the seat of Empire; here the juncture of the whole past Imperial system Nothing in London's past was so colossal as its present. This was the soul and the heart and brain of London, and it -was fixed in the present, not in any former age. There could have been nothing even corresponding to this in Paris since the fall of the great Napoleon. Several times, indeed, since Waterloo Paris has had its revivals, especially under the lesser Napoleon. But it has never regained its old throne and power amongst the capitals. The revival has been only a reflection of bygone days. Its later revolutions have been the upflarings of the torch that was burning to extinction. And after its greatest revival during the Second Empire, it fell into a more settled decline, not into poverty —that crisis soon passed, —but to a lower rank and a lesser destiny, a loss of spiritual power and creative intellect. _ Meanwhile, just as in Athens, while it declined politically, it became more and more the resort of students v and tourists, who thronged into view and to study. In the summer they partly usurped the place of its own citizens. But they no longer came to get tone and polish and culture from Parisian circles. The Parisian society belonged to itself. It did not, as it had once done, and as London still does, irresistibly attract to itself all that was brilliant in intellect and attainments from all countries. This fact is obvious from the memoirs and biographies of the nineteenth century as compared with those of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only in art and science it retained its old supremacy, as Athens did under the Roman Empire. Above all, it was the centre of theatrical art. In the theatres seemed to be the most conspicuous part of its civic life. Every visitor —except those Avho came with a special object, and who kept to it—went to the theatres and the opera in Paris. Yet even in theatrical art London -*Tas beginning to rival Paris.

It may be as well to begin by giving an impression of Paris sucb as a traveller would be likely to get at first if be were not a specialist, but merely taking things as they presented themselves. The first impression would - probably be that of modernity. Take the city as a whole: drive or else stroll on foot through its principal thoroughfares, its broad trees, shadowed boulevards, the Quais along its river, its wide avenues, and its Bois — everything suggested that it belonged to the 'nineteenth century, not to antiquity. Bear in mind that by " nineteenth century " is meant the period between the great —i.e.. the first Revolution —and the present greater war of Europe, or possibly a few years before the last event, when the rise of the democracy in Europe had begun to affect its character. In the summer time this nineteenth-century Paris was one of the most delightful of cities to stay in. and the one where the inhabitants least missed the open-air life of the country. They had made an openair life on the boulevards, Avhere in fine weather a perpetual civic garden party was held, divided into groups, but yet each agreeably conscious of the rest of the world. No one who has ever seen this open-air town life of Paris need want an argument for planting wide, tree-shadowed avenues- around and through their towns if the object of men and women collecting in towns is to make life more pleasant. There are climatic reasons whv the same plan should not be followed m Britain : but in Northern New Zealand there would be everything in favour of imitating the Parisians.

Pari? enjoyed the immense advantage of having been systematically replanned and laid" out. in accordance with designs which kept in view the attractiveness of t':e city and the enjoyment of its citizens. 1\ was a gigantic task to remodel one of the largest capitals of the world. Its accomplishment ought to silence those toocautious critics who pooh-pooh any suggestion of regulating the unwieldy growth

of our comparatively small towns. Obviously the thing can "be done if the powers that be have the spirit to set about it. That is what transformed Paris says to u? with the tongues of all its innumerable avenues and places. The idea originated, as we might expect, in the brain of the great Napoleon, though it remained indefinite, and only certain parts were altered and built upon, the Arc de Triomphe, for example. The actual achievement was due to his nephew, the third Napoleon, who. by the way, has not received his due in the matter of the public works carried out under his direction. We know pretty well what the Paris cf the Ancient Regime was—a city of splendid palaces and mansions (the hotels of the nobles), with palace gardens, which combined stateliness of courts with the charms of art and Nature, and hidden behind these a maze of wretched, narrow streets, where the masses were kept in a state practically of semi-savagery. There is quite enough of the old town left in and around the Quartier Latin to give us a good idea of the Faubourgs, from which the maddened mob streamed out, laughing and furious, in the black days of the September Massacres and the Terror.