SUMMER AT PARIS

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1934, Page 19 (Supplement)

SUMMER AT PARIS

A CITY OF SURPRISES CHANGES SINCE THE RIOTS. TOURIST TRADE LACKING. Paris is a town full of strange surprises. With a little stretch of the r .agination I might say that I am writing this from the depths of the African jungle. For at this late hour, when the cars are no longer allowed to hoot, I can hear the roaring of lions outside my window. “Outside my window” is a slight exaggeration; they are really half a mile away, in the Place DenfertRochereau, writes the Parisian correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. They are members of the travelling menagerie which forms part of the big street fair in the Boulevard St. Jacques and the, Place Denfert-Rochereau. At night they voice their discontent over a wide area of Paris. These street fairs, which go on throughout the summer, must provide at least some consolation to those Parisians who are unable to take a holiday. They create the illusion that Paris is only a big village. This has been an excellent summer. It was hot and sunny most of the time, and right up to the middle of September Paris was uncomfortably hot and sultry, with nearly 85 degrees in the shade. The seaside resorts were and are still crowded, though they have had to depend mostly on French visitors. Gone are the days when large stretches of the Norman and Breton coast could be mistaken for Brighton, Blackpool, or Rothesay. Although “les vacances" are a sacred institution, the French holiday maker has become, owing to “la crise,” even more economical than before. I have just seen a family of three who spent their holidays in an “excellent little pension'’ in a small seaside resort in Brittany at the equivalent of 10s a day (for the three). Roast chicken and lobster (or its more plebeian ctusln the “sea spider”) were the staple food. So, in spite of “la crise,” most of the Paris faces are of a healthy brown colour just now. The chief sufferers are the big hotels, or those which habitually cater for foreigners. For the number of foreign tourists is no greater—some say It is even smaller—than last year. It may be due to the high exchange or to the fear of riots and revolutions—not that there is any evidence of them at the moment. PRINCESS MARINA. But the clouds have a silver lining. And this lining was provided by Princess Marina, who not merely went on a shopping expedition in the Rue de via Paix but actually bought her trousseau or part of her trousseau there. It gave old Parisians the warm feeling that Paris was still Paris and that the Rue de la Paix had regained something of its unrivalled pre-war reputation for smartness. The decline _of “haute couture” (fashionable tailoring) is,, of course, quantitative, not qualitative; and tariffs have done it. If the high exchange has frightened away many prospective English tourists to France, the low exchange has attracted an altogether unusual number of French tourists (or would Ivor Brown call them trippers?) to England. The Frenchman’s most striking and most memorable impression of England is London’s red double-decker bus. It is to him like a symbol of Dickensian England—the England of his dreams— brought up to date. Another striking impression ts the sunny weather in the “city ?of eternal fog.” The Frenchman is least of all impressed by English cooking at leapt in its less expensive forms. He will never get used to thick soup or prunes and custard. ARSON-PROOF KIOSKS. There have been few outward changes In Paris in the past year. “When the building trade prospers, everything prospers,” the French say. And the building trade is about as unprosperous as anything else. Perhaps _M. Marouet’s public works plan will give It a fillip. Rents have come down considerably, especially in the case of large houses, and any building that is still going on is mostly confined to enormous blocks of tiny two and ttnee room flats. An important development in transport has been the extension of two of the underground lines into the hitherto sorely neglected suburbs. Singularly enough, not all the suburbs want these new facilities; thus-the town council of Neuilly, the western residential suburb, declared in substance that an underground extension would “popularise” and lower the “tone” of Neuilly, and that they would rather do without it. A great novelty on the boulevards is the all-metal, nickle-plated, newspaper kiosks. They owe their existence to the February riots, when many of the old wooden knosks were burned down. Even those that survived are being replaced—perhaps in anticipation of more trouble —by metal kiosks. The newsvenders inside will find them more comfortable, especially on cold winter nights, than the draughty old wooden stalls; but they do not lend themselves to the same picturesque display of papers and magazines which used to be one of the features of the Paris boulevards. HOLIES OF HOLIES. It is only, during the “silly season” that ordinary, mortals are allowed to visit the whole interior of the Chamber of Deputies. When Parliament is sitting they can gain admission only to the Public Gallery, and even that is a troublesome process. Even journalists are confined to the Lobby and the Press Gallery. But during the “silly season parties of schoolboys are taken through the Chamber every afternoon. By pretending to be one of the party, I was able, the other day, to visit all the holies of holies usually reserved for the deputies only. I learned all sorts of things [ had not known before; for instance, that there is a throne-room in the Chamber where Louis-Philippe and Napoleon 111 presided over various ceremonies; that the ceiling in. the library (the destruction of which haunted the librarian on the night of February 6) was painted by Delacroix; and that, the Speaker’s chair was the very chair in which Louis XVI was seated when he heard his death sentence. The usher who conducted the tour added facetiously that the chair weighed fifty kilogrammes and that the King was in no danger of toppling over with excitement. He also patted the upholstery on the Prime Minister’s bench, which he declared to be quite soft, and urged the schoolboys to sit down and try. In the main lobby he announced that although two of the statues were of real bronze the great statue of Minerva in the centre was “merely plaster.”