THE PARIS OF TO-DAY. I. THE CAPITAL OF CIVILISATION. I BLUSH for the French as deeply as anybody. I realise as clearly, too, that if they wish to remain a nation they should send for British governors, British judges, and a British army of occupation, leaving to themselves the cultivation of the arts in which they admittedly excel. I am loath to break my journeys in their capital, and especially shrink from pretending that I can speak a little of their language. Yet I here admit at the very beginning that if anything could make an Englishman ashamed of England, it would be two days in Paris. It is useless to contend against the truth. Paris is the capital of civilisation. Paris has been the capital of civilisation ever since civilisation began. In the course of our national business of empire we have often occasion to use the word, but one look at Paris is enough to inform even the partial mind how little we know of civilisation, the fact, the life. Our civilisation is of the kind we can pass on to lower stairs of humanity, to their great benefit and our The Parisian civilisation is a rare vintage that loses its bouquet the moment it passes outside the fortifications. Therefore, Parisian civilisation is of limited use to the world: but it is of great use to Paris. own. London was obviously made-had to work for its living, and won its imperial greatness gradually and with pain. The streets of Mayfair are patchwork, and the houses and alleys of the City squeeze each other till you expect to see them pushed off their legs. The people who began these things seem never to have guessed that the work of their hands was destined to become great. But Paris gives the impression of having known her imperial destiny from the baking of the very first brick. You go to your window in the morning and look out upon a forest of twisted, zinc chimney-pots, less beautiful than signposts. Beyond them, it may be, rises the arc of a great wheel, and that straddling, graceful monstrosity, the Eiffel Tower. From the streets rise the sounds of lumbering, of antiquated omnibuses and the clattering grunts of precocious automobiles. There ought to be nothing at all Yet the air is so beautiful and dignified about it. clear and essentially still, the light so sharp and serene, the lines of the houses so correct and harmonious, everything so bright and clear, that you might be in a seventeenth-century court instead of in a nineteenth-century capital. Outside there is everywhere space and light and air; Paris has grown without cramping. You come on vast façades, whether of palaces or of private houses, all blending into a large effect, which is both light and statelyneither heavy, like the Quadrant, nor trumpery, like South Kensington. The smaller streets are cleanpaved underfoot, silent, and not jammed by traffic— they might be rides cut through a wood. The very workmen's quarters brustle without choking; the very tenement-houses remember that they owe a duty to the eye. I wrote these words in autumn days, and at the season all Paris smelled of falling chestnut and plane; your feet rustled in the leaves, and through the halfstripped boughs you peeped at sixteenth-century mansions and advertisements of the phonograph. For Paris is both old and new-the oldest and the newest of ruling cities, the most primitive and the most complex. At night the central streets are all electric light and transparencies: to our one "Vinolia" or "Mellin's Food" they have fifty; "Express Bar," "Folies Bergère," or "Café Chose": |