Editor’s note: This week we celebrate the City of Light. All week (beginning today) we delve into all things Parisian in honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company Book Store. See PillartoPost.org coverage of Ms. Beach triumph on November 19, 1919. But for now, let’s revisit American author Theodore Dreiser's love letter to Paris.
FROM: “A TRAVELER AT 40: PARIS!”
An excerpt from “Americans in Paris: a literary
anthology.”
By Theodore Dreiser, American, [1871-1945]
As we
neared Paris he had built this city up so thoroughly in my mood that I am
satisfied that I could not have seen it with a realistic eye if I had tried. It
was something—I cannot tell you what—Napoleon, the Louvre, the art quarter,
Montmartre, the gay restaurants, the boulevards, Balzac, Hugo, the Seine and
the soldiery, a score and a hundred things too numerous to mention and all
greatly exaggerated.
I hoped to see something which was perfect in its
artistic appearance—exteriorly speaking. I expected, after reading George Moore
and others, a wine-like atmosphere; a throbbing world of gay life; women of
exceptional charm of face and dress; the bizarre, the unique, the emotional,
the spirited.
At Amiens, I had seen enough women entering the
trains to realize that the commonplace of the English woman was gone. Instead
the young married women that we saw were positively daring compared to what
England could show—shapely, piquant, sensitive, their eyes showing a birdlike awareness
of what this world has to offer.
I fancied Paris would be like that, only more so; and
as I look back on it now I can honestly say that I was not greatly
disappointed. It was not all that I thought it would be, but it was enough. It
is a gay, brilliant, beautiful city, with the spirit of New York and more than
the distinction of London. It is like a
brilliant, fragile child—not made for contests and brutal battles, but gay
beyond reproach.
Source: From
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
(Library of America, 2004), pages 202–10.
Originally published in A Traveler at Forty (1913).
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