PARIS LETTER
407
One very often finds in this category that student whose adapta–
tion to French life seems to have been most perfect, and whose studies–
of French art, or the drama, the language, or the history-give him the
greatest right to be here. This student has put aside chewing gum for–
ever, he eschews the T-shirt, and the crew cut, he can only with diffi–
culty be prevailed upon to see an American movie, and it is so patent
that he is
actually
studying that his appearance at the cafe tables is
never taken as evidence of frivolity, but only as proof of his admirable
passion to study the customs of the country. One assumes that he is
living as the French live-which assumption, however, is immediately
challenged by the suspicion that no American
can
live as the French
live, even if one could find an American who wanted to. This student
lives, nevertheless, with a French family, with whom he speaks French,
and takes his meals; and he knows, as some students do not, that the
Place de la Bastille no longer holds the prison. He has read, or is
reading, all of Racine, Proust, Gide, Sartre, and authors more obscure–
in the original, naturally. He regularly visits the museums, and he con–
siders Arletty to be the most beautiful woman and the finest actress in
the world. But the world, it seems, has become the French world: he
is
unwilling to recognize any other. This so severely cramps the Amer–
ican conversational style, that one looks on this student with awe, and
some shame-he is so spectacularly getting out of his European exper–
ience everything it has to give.
He
has certainly made contact with the
French, and isn't wasting his time in Paris talking to people he might
perfectly well have met in America. His friends are French, in the class–
room, in the bistro, on the boulevard, and, of course, at home-it is
only that one is sometimes driven to wonder what on earth they find
to talk about. This wonder is considerably increased when, in the rare
conversations he condescends to have in English, one discovers that,
certain picturesque details aside, he seems to know no more about life
in Paris than everybody knew at home. His friends have, it appears,
leaped unscathed from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, en–
tirely undismayed by any of the reverses suffered by their country.
This makes them a remarkable band indeed, but it is in vain that one
attempts to discover anything more about them-their conversation
being limited, one gathers, to remarks about French wine, witticisms
concerning
I'amour,
French history, and the glories of Paris. The re–
markably limited range of their minds
is
matched only by their per–
plexing definition of friendship, a definition which does not seem to
include any suggestion of communication, still less of intimacy. Since,
in
short, the relationship of this perfectly adapted student to the people
he
now so strenuously adores
is
based simply on his unwillingness to
