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yarrow revisited THIS is not the Paris of my student days nor even the Paris of the second Pan-African Congress held three years ago. I seem to glimpse in the memories of those visits an enchanted city of gay streets, blue skies, of romantically historic monuments, a playground, a court of justice of the world. Every one was possessed of a fine courtesy; attendants were kind and generous, though even then a little too conscious , for an American, of the possibility of tips; there was a delicious sense of laisser-aller.1 Perhaps the difference lies in the season. I have never been here before so late in the year. One speaks of France and its golden weather as though that condition were perpetual. It is only October but the skies are drab, the days are grey and every twenty-four hours rain falls, steady, penetrating, soaking. The boulevards are still full, even crowded, but with Frenchmen now, not tourists; one meets with as much courtesy here, no more, no less, than anywhere else. In brief, life in Paris is life the civilized world over. But there is one exception. I am glad to have had those golden memories of former visits.Yet I am glad to be here now in this workaday season. “Life as she is—” that is what I want to know even if it is different to the verge of disappointment from preconceived notions.Truth is best.Yet dreams are fine stuff too.In the last of those three poems of Wordsworth on Yarrow—Yarrow Unvisited ,Visited,Revisited,there are,I remember,these words: “The visions of the past Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is—” It is precisely because of those visions that I am eager to know life, French life“as she is.” Just as the weather is by no means always golden and gay, so French living is not always a thing of joy and laughter. 239 I am not living in the vicinity of the gay, wide boulevards. I lived there three years ago. Nor am I in the“Quartier Latin,”the famous student quarter; I spent some months there when I was a student. From both of these former environments my faulty impressions. No this time I am installed high up in a small, quiet hotel on a rather narrow but busy side-street, though still near the“quarter.”It is far, far from the Boulevard des Italiens. But it is right in the heart of a teeming business and residential section. I love comfort,I love ease.I do not consider laziness a crime.I hate to move. Yet so determined am I to see “Life as she is” that with as much joy as reluctance have I mapped out this plan: Two weeks in a cheap pension. (Already over, thank God!) A month in this small,comfortable hotel.(There is a fire-place in my room.) A month in a“good”French family. A month in a first-class pension. After that such travel as my remaining means and time may permit. The pension held, as I suspect all cheap boarding houses do, the elements of unspeakable dreariness. It was a large house built inevitably of stone, set romantically, I thought at first, far, far back in a courtyard to which one gained access by one of those thick, slowly moving doors set flush in a stone arch-way. It is this type of architecture, the lack of our projecting steps, the flatness of doors and windows which give me at any rate the effect in certain quarters of Paris of living in a fortified city.Within the house was a broad winding staircase built beautifully in an open well so that one might stand on the ground floor and glimpse the roof ceiling. It was the only . beautiful thing in that house. Within two days I found it was not so “romantic” to live in a courtyard for the sun practically never penetrated the house. Oh that dampness! I, fresh from America with its steam heat and its auxiliary appliances of gas and oil, gas logs and accessible fireplaces, could understand Esau’s quittance of his birthright for a mess of pottage. I’d have handed over the birthrights of all my friends and relations for an ordinary gas heater with fixtures. Incidentally I do not “get” the French attitude toward this matter of heating. Of course for a few extra daily cents I was...

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