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PARIS, FRANCEIS exciting and peaceful
By Gertrude Stein
 PARIS, FRANCEIS exciting and peaceful.
I was only four years old when I was first in Paris and talked french there and was photographed there and went to school there, and ate soup for early breakfast and had leg of mutton and spinach for lunch, I always liked spinach, and a black cat jumped on my mother's back. That was more exciting than peaceful. I do not mind cats but I do not like them to jump on my back. There are lots of cats in Paris and in France and they can do what they like, sit on the vegetables or among the groceries, stay in or go out. It is extraordinary that they fight so little among themselves considering how many cats there are. There are two things that french animals do not do, cats do not fight much and do not howl much and chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.
Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful and exciting.
So I was in Paris a year when I was four to five and then I was back in America. A child does not forget but other things happen. A little later in San Francisco there was more french. After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
The English Victorians were like that about Italy, the early nineteenth century Americans were like that about Spain, the middle nineteenth century Americans were like that about England, my generation the end of the nineteenth century American generation was like that about France.
Of course sometimes people discover their own country as if it were the other, a recent instance of that is Louis Bromfield discovering America, there have been a few English like that too, Kipling for instance discovered England but in general that other country that you need to be free in is the other country not the country where you really belong.
In San Francisco it was easy that it should be France. Of course it might have been Spain or China, but really in San Francisco as a child one really knew too much about Spain and China, and France was interesting while Spain and China were familiar, and daily. France was not daily it just came up again and again.
It came up first in such different books, Jules Verne and Alfred de Vigny and it came up in my mother's clothes and the gloves and the sealskin caps and muffs and the boxes they came in. There was the smell of Paris in that. And then for quite a long while it was very easy to forget France. The next thing I remember about France were the Henry Henrys and Sarah Bernhardt, the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo and Millet's Man With The Hoe.
The Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo.
One of the pleasantest things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come. I was about eight years old and it came with the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo. It was painted by a frenchman, I wonder if it would not be interesting to have one now, one of those huge panoramas, where you stood in the center on a platform and all around you on every side of you was an oil painting. You were completely surrounded by an oil painting.
It was then I first realised the difference between a painting and out of doors. I realised that a painting is always a flat surface and out of doors never is, and that out of doors is made up of air and a painting has no air, the air is replaced by a flat surface, and anything in a painting that imitates air is illustration and not art. I seem to have felt all that very intensely standing on the platform and being all surrounded by an oil painting.
And then there was Sarah Bernhardt. San Francisco had lots of french people in it, and a french theatre and one naturally knew little girls and boys who talked french at home quite naturally. And so when a french actor or actress came to San Francisco they always stayed a long time.
They liked it there and of course when actresses or actors stay anywhere they always act, so naturally there was a great deal of French spoken in the theatre. It was then that I found out quite naturally, that french is a spoken language and English a written one. In France whenever anybody writes anything and wants anybody to know what it is like they read it out loud. If it is in English it is natural to pass the manuscript to them and let them read it but if it is in french it is natural to read it out loud.
French is a spoken language English really is not.
Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of frenchwomen. When I came to Paris and saw the little midinettes and Montmartoises they all had them. It was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore long skirts, that I realised what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That is what makes the french such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.
That is what makes all the french able to ride up hill on bicycles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedalling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms. The other thing that was french there in San Francisco were the family of Henry Henrys. That was their name. There was a father and mother they were known as Monsieur and Madame Henry and there were five children the oldest Henry Henrys played the violin We used to go there in the afternoon and stay to dinner and then we used to dance the Henry children and ourselves, to the french music of the violin.
And we always for dinner had a roast of mutton, a gigot they called it, cooked the same way as when I went to school in Paris and potatoes in the butter around it, clean looking potatoes, not so dark as when they were cooked American. But the thing that was most exciting were the knives and forks. The knives had been sharpened so much that the blade was as thin as a dagger with a slight bend on top and the forks so light that when you pressed on them they bent. These knives and forks were the most passionately french things I knew, I might say I ever knew.
Then there was Millet's Man With The Hoe. I had never really wanted a photograph of a picture before I saw Millet's Man With The Hoe. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I had read Eugenie Grandet of Balzac, and I did have some feeling about what french country was like but The Man With The Hoe made it different, it made it ground not country, and France has been that to me ever since. France is made of ground, of earth.
When I managed to get a photograph of the picture and took it home my eldest brother looked at it and said what is it and I said it is Millet's Man With The Hoe. It is a hell of a hoe said my eldest brother.
But that is the way french country is, it is ground like that and they work at it just that way with just that kind of a hoe. All this was all the Paris France I really knew then and then for a very long time I forgot about Paris and about France.
Then one day when I was at college at Radcliffe in Cambridge Massachusetts, I was on a train and sitting next to me was a frenchman. I recognised him as a visiting lecturer and I spoke to him. We talked about American college women. Very wonderful he said and very interesting but and he looked at me earnestly, really not one of them, now you must admit that, not one of them could feel with Alfred de Musset that le seul bien qui me reste au monde c'est d'avoir quelque fois pleuré. I was young then but I knew what he meant that they would not feel like that. That and a certain interest in Zola as a realist but not as much interest as in the Russian realists was all that Paris meant to me until after the medical school when I settled down in Paris France.
Source: Paris France
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