CHAPTER XIXBEAUTY AS USUAL
Beforethe war there were few European peoples of whom we knew less, whom we misunderstood as thoroughly, as the French. We had a French tradition in the United States once, but that was long ago. New Orleans, St. Louis, and Charleston, South Carolina, were to a certain extent French cities up to the time of the Civil War. Old family names, the names of streets and squares, even a few monuments bear witness to this. But even in New Orleans the French tradition is now only a shadow. We have had little immigration from France in late years. Hence we know little of the people. There was a vague theory that they were frivolous, pleasure-loving and rather lax in their morals.
The French are not frivolous—they are volatile and gay. They are not pleasure-loving, any more than other peoples are. The questionable pleasures of Paris, the bal masques and the Moulin Rouge sort of thing, existed for tourists mainly. We thought the French liked that kind of unwholesome painted stuff because it was there, and they thought we liked it because we paid almost anything to get it. It is timethe two people, French and Americans, understood each other.
I think I can not convey a better idea of the French character, its unquestionable gaiety and indomitable courage, than by telling how through all risks and dangers and calamities, their worship of pure beauty persists. Beauty is a cult with the French. They can not endure anything ugly. Every national emotion is expressed in terms of beauty and grace.
Paris, as we know, has been under bombardment from the German long-distance guns since March twenty-third. Almost every day the gun has sounded. Some days its spiteful boom sounded every fifteen minutes from dawn until dark. Now one of the effects of this constant bombardment was that it threatened to break all the expensive plate-glass windows in the capital, and the people were advised to paste strips of paper across their windows. Window glass just now is not only expensive, but it is very scarce. Once broken, replacement becomes a serious matter.
Of course, strips of paper can not stop a shell or a piece of shrapnel, but they can lessen the shock of concussion. So Paris overnight blossomed from one end to the other with paper-stripped window glass.
But did they just paste on strips of paper, as almost any other people in the world would have done? They did not. They invented a new art of window decoration. Every merchant, every householder, vied with all the others to make their striped-up windows things of beauty. They devised color schemes, theystudied historic design, they made the paper strips advertise wares. In a word, bombs might fall, but beauty went on as usual.
But the most extraordinary manifestation of the unquenchable spirit of the French was the discussion, immediately opened, as to what a properly self-respecting woman, awakened in the night by death-dealing bombs from the sky, ought to wear when she fled to the cellar.
A leading Paris newspaper featured an interview with a well-known dressmaker in which the subject was thoroughly threshed out. The dressmaker recalled the fact that during the Reign of Terror of the French revolution the doomed aristocrats dressed for the guillotine as for a function, this being their last defiance of the mob. Hence it was but proper that their descendants, the French women of to-day, should not permit the German terror to interfere with their duty to look well on all occasions.
Thiscouturièredid not have to urge this duty on her clients. They overwhelmed her, she declared, with demands. It had become for them necessary to make frequent descents to the bowels of the earth, and that suddenly. What were they to put on? Nothing in their wardrobe seemed either suitable or practical.
Thus pressed, madame proceeded to invent a cellar gown. It sounds funny, but, after all, it may not be. Remember that the Parisians often had to leave their houses and walk or run half a block or so to find adequate shelter from aerial bombs. Hence a warm garmentwas called for. A woman is not necessarily robed for the street and for a damp cellar, twenty feet underground, when she throws a kimono over her nightgown. No!
“It was no small problem, you can readily understand,” declared madame. “I was obliged to invent a gown that one could put on quickly, at the first sound of thealerte. After much thought I decided on a domino model. By its simplicity and the amplitude of its dimensions, it is well suited to a rapid adjustment and a quick flight. It is provided with an ample hood to cover the hair and to guard against cold draughts.
“The traditional domino, however, is not provided with any pockets. These, of course, are very necessary in present conditions, since a number of indispensable objects accompany, or should accompany, a lady to a cave. She wishes to take with her not only the most precious of her jewels andbijoux, but her purse, watch, keys, mirror, also divers other small objects; an electric torch, manicuring tools, a box of powder, a lip stick, perhaps.
“She will require a pencil and a pad of paper, in case she wishes to keep a diary of events. She may wish to carry with her certain photographs which she can not bear to lose. Certainly she will need some morsels of chocolate, and in case the raid is a prolonged one, something to read. My bombardment robe contains pockets enough and ample for all emergency requirements.”
The color of the bombardment robe, or cellargown, was an important item. The average caveabrior cellar is not noted for its spotlessness. One must look out for that. Hence the proper color of the gown was something practical—brown, gray or taupe. However, the inventor of the gown found no ordinary color exactly to her mind.
She did not wish one of her clients, in the semi-obscurity of a cave, to be mistaken for a sack of potatoes, nor yet to be trodden on by an excited new arrival. She sought a color which should be neutral and yet outstanding, and she found it in a tint she called “chaudron,” the identification of which I shall have to leave to the experts.
It must be a very nice color, however. If you should have to hide in a coal cellar, it was said, the contact with the coal will not injure your appearance, but will paint your cellar gown with lovely Rembrandt effects. Moreover, the hood of thisrobe au chaudronis lined with some soft, tender color, which will lend beauty to the countenance of the wearer, and presumably make the cold and discomfort easier to endure.
I never descended to the caves during the air raid, preferring to take my chances on a lower floor. But if I did feel constrained to seek a wine cave, or a coal cellar while boche bombs were hurtling through the atmosphere, I admit I might like to wear something becoming. Anyhow, as long as the French go on making their lives beautiful in spite of air raids and guns that shoot seventy miles, in spite of devastating German hordes in the north and a war that shows smallsigns of abating, I think they prove themselves bad to beat, and allies we ought to be proud to claim.
Another thing I admired in the French was their constant sense of humor. They laughed at the Germans. The big gun, full of hate as it was, furnished a subject of jest.
The cartoonist drew caricatures of it that were full of wit. When one of the guns burst, killing, as it must have, a number of German gunners, a cartoonist pictured the inventor pointing to a miscellaneous collection of arms and legs which decorated the landscape, saying proudly: “You see, super-colonel, how kolossaly powerful my kanon is. It is as deadly at one end as it is at the other!” The Parisians found this irresistibly comic.
They laughed scornfully at the solemn lies published in the German papers regarding the alleged panic their bombardment was creating. I have seen men and women sitting outside the cafés in the Rue Royale and on the boulevards, sipping theirapéritifsbefore dinner and enjoying these exaggerations, as reprinted in the Paris papers.
They smiled and chuckled over the news announced in the StuttgartNeues Tageblattthat Paris would soon be a mass of ruins; that even the working class population no longer had the hardihood to remain. The roads leading to Tours, Orleans, Lyons, cities of the south, were crowded with interminable convoys, vehicles drawn by horses, donkeys and even dogs. Sick women were being transported in baby carriages. Theforest of Fontainbleau was one vast camp of refugees.
“Listen then to this,mon vieux,” reads a highly diverted Frenchman to his neighbor at the next table. “It is not only from fear of the Germans that the entire population is in flight, but it is from fear of the French themselves. The capital is filled with deserting soldiers and other disaffected persons who wait only a favorable opportunity to overthrow the government. Do you hear? TheBerliner Tageblattsays so.”
Funniest of all to the Parisians were the tales of how the whole of Paris not fleeing to the south was living day and night underground, and how not only people but all public monuments were being sent to the caves.
A cartoon inLe Matin, I think it was, represented a Frenchman remarking to a friend that the fog was so thick yesterday that he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. “Oh, haven’t you heard?” exclaims the other, “Clemenceau has hidden it in the Metro.”
I write this also to give the American people an idea of the fantastic “news” with which the Germans feed their people and keep alive in them the hope that they can ultimately win this war. Some of these German dispatches appear in our own newspapers, exaggerated accounts of victories, absurd estimates of damage inflicted by bombardments. We should laugh at them as the French do.
The Germans tell their hungry populations that terror is winning the war, that the French civil populationis in flight and that the government is tottering. It is ridiculously untrue. Many people have left Paris, just as our people would seek refuge from a like situation.
All the people who have summer homes have gone to them earlier than usual. There is a systematic movement to take as many children as possible outside the danger zone. Delicate women and invalids have generally gone. That is all.