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PARTISAN REVIEW
But times have changed, and it did not take long to see that
the young men on the Left Bank were seeking in this city some–
thing else beside the seamy image of the twenties. After all, this was
Europe, Paris, the roof was off, and they need not worry about that
oppressive contempt which America, in fear of its own shadow
side, turns on the homosexual. Their explosiveness had got to the
point where it was scandalizing the French. The French may make a
minor religion of love and sex, or at least of the talk of sex and love,
but they insist that these things be pursued with the usual French
sense of discretion,
mesure
or proportion, which is at bottom merely
the terrifying habit of calculation that haunts the Frenchman in
everything he does. Now, the youthful and innocent violence of the
Americans was upsetting the French when it was happening in
their own home- like a host alarmed when the guest whom he
has invited to be completely at home takes him at his word and
begins smashing the furniture. The French reacted as if they had
not meant quite what they had said, as if all their talk about love
had only been talk after all. The police staged a series of raids on
the homosexual joints where the young Americans hung out, carting
the boys away in paddy wagons to the Prefecture, where they drew
up dossiers for them, asking whether or not the young men were
inverts and duly recording the answer. That was all; since homo–
sexuality is no crime under French law, the police could go no
further; they only wanted to give the boys a scare, and so perhaps
break up the gangs, or at least keep them from carrying on so
brazenly in public. Perhaps no public disturbance was being created,
but the effect was not always pleasant: in one of the raided cafes,
from the sidewalk you could see the boys standing around the bar
and pawing each other, and some people formed the habit of a
detour to avoid the place. Rumors of the American antics were being
fed to the general public, which in this moment of French history
seems to want reasonS for its resentments toward wealthy America:
nearly every issue of
Samedi Soir,
the lurid weekly of Paris, carried
some report on "the wave of immorality from the new world," the
reporter ridiculously leering over the more salubrious items. "The
Scandal of the Latin Quarter" would be a title that usually announced
some new American exploit. This general uneasiness among the
French finally reached Andre Gide himself, perhaps the remote
