PARIS LETTER
363
I make a great point of this, the appalling precariousness of man's
situation in Africa, because Paris presented itself to me, with the simplicity
of evidence, as an assurance of our survival. When I arrived the weather
was unbelievably lovely and the gracious controJied beauty of the city
kept moving me to tears. Does that sound silly? But think a minute.
We've known nothing, for as long as we can remember, but stupidity
or knavery in high places. Or both. We've heard nothing but the roaring
of the beast. The ancient stones which Europeans have been placing,
one upon the other, for centuries, have been idiotically smashed and
beaten down, frequently with our own bazookas and aerial bombs. And
those of us who believed that the colossus, our country, must forever
humanize itself in the contemplation of these stones and in dialogue
with the spirit that created them, have been fearful and disheartened.
Yet here, in April, 1945, on the banks of this little river, and on
the islets which held the fortress of the Parisii, allies of Caesar, is a
City, built by men and for men, a habitat on the human scale, a monu–
ment to our ancestors. I turn right from the Place du Palais-Bourbon
and walk along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The broad street is lined
with trees, tender trees which crack no pavements and carefully moderate
the spread of their branches, sifting through their dark greenness the
grey luminosity which is evening here. I may stop at number 180, walk
to the third floor and ask Daniel Lazarus to demonstrate again why one
should not play the Bach suite according to the conventional measure
pattern. I m;:ty ask Jean Mousset to talk about the little hidden churches
near Saint-Sulpice. They are ironic, learned men. They belong here.
The solid masonry of the buildings is unobtrusive: each construction is
different, yet modulated each to each, so that there is a whole, an ancient
elabora.ted collectivity, a communion in time. This is not simply a double
row of buildings. This is the Boulevard du Faubourg Saint-Germain.
And if I turn north and walk to the Seine, where the booksellers are
shutting up their staBs, I find that the bridges which lead to the Louvre,
or to Notre Dame, and the great triumphant architectural masses them–
selves, have molded themselves to the color of the earth, the water and
the sky. This is not simply a coJlection of buildings, this is the city,
man's city.
With the balmy weather came the first batches of returning prison–
ers, filthy, ragged and hungry, each with his history of boredom or
horror. Frenay's Ministry for Prisoners and Deported was immediately
swamped, and Paris has been filled with depressing stories about the
inadequacy and confusion of the government services in the face of this
stupendous task. At the same time, French correspondents have been
wandering about in the land of Apocalypse, appalled, I suspect, not only
by the spectacle of Buchenwald, Belsen-Belsen, Dachau etc., but also
by the apparently irreductible
Menschlichkeit
of the people in whose
