For the stranger who does at least a part of his sight-seeing after a
rational and orderly fashion, there are pictures that will live in the
memory always: the Madeleine, with the flower market just alongside;
the green and gold woods of the Bois de Boulogne; the grandstand of the
racecourse at Longchamp on a fair afternoon in the autumn; the Opera
at night; the promenade of the Champs-Elysees on a Sunday morning after
church; the Gardens of the Tuileries; the wonderful circling plaza of
the Place Vendome, where one may spend a happy hour if the maniacal
taxi-drivers deign to spare one's life for so unaccountably long a
period; the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, with their exquisite shops,
where every other shop is a jeweler's shop and every jeweler's shop is
just like every other jeweler's shop--which fact ceases to cause wonder
when one learns that, with a few notable exceptions, all these
shops carry their wares on commission from the stocks of the same
manufacturing jewelers; the old Ile de la Cite, with the second-hand
bookstalls stretching along the quay, and the Seine placidly meandering
between its man-made, man-ruled banks. Days spent here seem short days;
but that may be due in some part to the difference between our time and
theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six hours earlier than
it does in America.
The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on beyond
them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored instincts,
all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their
grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white to the eye in
the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's Fair as we know such
things in America. Seeing them I knew where the architects who designed
the main approaches and the courts of honor for all our big expositions
got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better
those two ancient triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the
Boulevard St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous
sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in
the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I reckon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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