PARIS IN 1930
The Spirit of Paris. By Paul Cohen-Portheim. (Batsford. 7s. 6d.) WffH the franc at a hundred and twenty-five, one can afford to renew acquaintance with what used to be the most enchanting Of cities. It is a sad place now. All that is spiritual and beautiful about it falls into decay, and its place is taken by all that is intellectual and priggish. Versailles is overgrown with ivy and nettles, and Fontainebleau becomes a bog, while the Popular Front spends tmraised money upon Museums of Thought, of Peace, of Man. The ugly old Trocadero is gone, And they say the Eiffel Tower is to come down. In their place there spreads the smug, whitewashed dreariness of the Exhibi- tion. Already a monument to Foch has given way to a ridicu- lous Symbol of Peace. Soon, no doubt, the Invalides will fall beneath the censure of a pacifist Government : it will go the way of the Pantheon, and be rededicated to the memory of 'the most inglorious epoch since the republic. Paris has abdicated her leadet3hip of the civilised world : instead, she apes the culture of Moscow or Madrid.
Paul Cohen-Portheim wrote this book upon the Spirit of Paris before the slump, and long before the Popular Front was, heard of. It was published in Germany in 193o, and has not been issued in this country before now. Unfortunately, it dates. Cohen-Portheim knew Paris both above and below : and no reader of his book on London will need to be told that his perceptions were exceptionally keen and sympathetic. Bw. the Paris that he knew was not the Paris of today. It was a city in which men earned good money and enjoyed it, .wherE now -they :strike and: :Starve3.- a -city whose -titotidS of passiVe and good-humoured passeri-by have given place: to organised processions of seedy doctrinaires. In every chapter of Cohen,Porsheim's description there are the traces of ana- chronism..._; He. speaks, in the present tense of pleasures that survive only for .the tourist. The theatre that he describes is almost dead, and crowds collect to stare at a couple in evening dress. It is with almost a feeling of guilt that one orders 'a meal at prices that only South Americans-can really afford to pay.
The whole spirit in which Cohen-Portheim approached his subject is out of tune with the present times. He dared. the dreadful heresy of laughing at museums ; he called them " cemeteries," " Houses of Correction for unruly works -of art." Worse still, he admitted to a predilection for the Folies- Bergere and the Moulin Rouge, a ". highly =intellectual form of art." He loved low life 'and high life : the dead level *of theoretical progress would have frozen his soul. If only- he could have given._ us a chapter on the Exhibition—on the ranges of galleries and museums erected by a penniless adminis- tration : on the " typical French village " from which the Government was so anxious to exclude a church: on the insipid travertine of the German pavilion : on the ghastly lump- -of statuary which bears aloft the hammer and sickle across the way. Surely this is the strangest triumphal avenue of all that were ever built in Paris. Napoleon, standing on his favourite site and looking towards the Invalides across this battlefield of false ideals, would have delivered himself of some observa- tions worthy of attention. .
Take this book with you if you go to Paris. It will remind you where to find the best of what remains ; and it is worth possessing for its photographs alone. - CHRISTOPHER HOBHOUSE.
Previous page
