Grand Tour, New Style: A Young American Discovers His Europe

VOLUME 150

NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 1932

BY WILLIAM HARLAN HALE

WHEN the diploma was safely clutched in the hand, a profound feeling of emptiness, of task officially completed but actually undone, enveloped the celebrant. June, and the customary romances of commencement; and speeches and no job. . . . The only thing to do was to go far away, swing into some new tide, find a further world; perhaps win a diploma more worth having.

Orange crates and ferryboats in the swash of the piers: leave them behind. Dense shipping in the Upper Bay, pilot boat, Fire Island: leave them behind. And the long lift and roll of the Atlantic come riding under the bows. We sit on a high terrace and look moonstruck into the wake trailing off to America; President Hoover declares moratorium: leave it all behind.

Six days of flamboyant French dishes and of wan débutantes dancing against the roll of the parquet floor; and then, after the orchids and the tipping, that unforgettable first repas on French soil — in a neglected garden under the towers of the ruined abbey of Jumièges, off the road from Havre to Paris, rarely visited, naked fallen Norman grandeur. We have a bottle of coarse vin rouge apiece, and suddenly make the astounding discovery that drinking has no connection with sin or morality: it is a matter of course, a gift of the soil. We order another round, and look up to the moss in the white towers beloved of William the Conqueror and Agnes Sorel, and we grow eloquent and younger than ever before.

On, then, through the lined trees and flat heavy fields of Île-de-France and Normandy; and weeks of removal, of swimming and cigars, in a forgotten town in southern Brittany. Here no newspapers come except a provincial sheet from the measly town of Rennes; it is passionately anti-German, and now, during the pacific pleasures of the Hoover pronouncement, works up fear and terror against the Teuton ogre. The fishermen go off to silent work, and pass under a garish sign headed ‘L’Allemagne veut-elle la guerre?’ Over near Vannes we encounter several regiments of field artillery at drill; they sweat mightily, It’s a great fighting nation; but just why these lonely Bretons should be concerned seems a bit of a mystery, In a dingy café we asked one of them; he himself was not quite clear about it.

Copyright 1932, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Even at Chartres there is a great military flying field. Monoplanes zoom above the towers, and some tourists are more impressed by the bugles of the garrison than by the choir that competes with them from within. At night, though, when practically no one thinks of looking at it, and when the airport has gone to sleep, Chartres is superb; and only a few steps from the north portal there is to be had a noble bottle of

All, indeed, is still for the best, in the cathedral world of France.

Descend on Paris in July, and see the fall of the modern Athens. Charming, hospitable, penny-snatching, philosophical and filthy Paris — so utterly spoiled by its reputation through eight centuries as a tourist Mecca. Paris, the tasteful city where the world’s greatest art collection is housed in the world’s most hideous and impossible museum; Paris, the suave, elegant city that is more bourgeois than Milwaukee; Paris, the artistic capital of the world that houses in special prominence the world’s most melancholy cultural hangover — the Americans of Montparnasse.

Paris, the political hub of Europe, and probably the only big city of Europe whose newspaper press makes absolutely no attempt to report the day’s news. . . . Laval, Flandin, and the paid government papers are carefully going about to wreck the moratorium — a pretty picture of inspired counsels. And now the ministers are crossing foreign borders, and dining sumptuously in the various capitals; there are shabby crowds rounded up to cheer them, the photographers squeeze bulbs and twist cranks, and nothing happens.

II

Off on a midsummer train to Berlin — sixteen hours of the plush horrors of a Continental carriage, with six pairs of second-class knees butting into each other, six pairs of eyes growing more hostile at every station and movement. We rush through the small agriculture of eastern France, past the Marne (an old officer points out: There, and There, and There), up into Belgium with its gayly uniformed officials, Liége bustling with recruits, up into ever more pleasantly carved country to the border at Herbesthal, where things started that first week in August, 1914. We watch the slow change of language through French and Flemish into German, and finally the appearance of the historic red cap of the German station manager.

Slipping off the heights in mid-afternoon, we pass close by the first beer garden, tablecloths green and yellow, and many large men sitting. The landscape changes with extra speed, a different tempo from France. The expected geometry and logic of French plains and acres are the opposite of the dark rising forests and romantic surprise of the German lands: the soil mothers the soul of peoples. In later afternoon we rush through the mighty factory regions, Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, all quiet on a Sunday and people in their gardens. During dinner we pass through the Westphalian Gate with Charlemagne enshrined on the bluff, and have our first trial at Piesporter Goldtröpfchen — watch your vintages.

Midnight, and we slide into the centre of Berlin, and out into the August streets ablaze with lights, crowds moving, cafés jammed, and orchestras all along. Over to the Kurfürstendamm, and out for a jaunt into the flicker. Here is an institution that provides five floors of night club: appropriate name, ‘Femina.’ You sit around the outer ring of a double bar; around the inner ring twenty girls are ready to pass your order on to the pair of bartenders who reign in the middle. Table telephones, girls with monocles, formal and informal dance floors, champagne and beer, chambres séparées and mass halls — open strictly all night.

On, then, past other lighted doors which cloak the blare of saxophones; innocently into a ‘ladies’ night-bar’ and out in great confusion; into the Lion, where you might see Max Schmeling and the Crown Prince and the leading local haberdashers rubbing elbows along the rail; down the avenue to the Eldorado, with its notorious mural paintings on late Roman subjects, and the ‘girls’ who — who are not what they seem. And out, early Monday morning, into the empty side streets and men slinking into the dawn, poor beer halls closed tight with the chairs roosting atop the tables, deserted stores, buildings for sale, colorless early-Empire houses so sadly different from the narrow bulging smokestacked and unforgettable house fronts of the rue Saint-Jacques or Victor-Cousin or a thousand others. Here are white, neat, tiny, and forbidding butcher shops, which probably have n’t sold a chicken in a year. For Sale, To Let, For Sale. And then, as we walk into bigger streets: Down with the Socialist Régime, Down with the Traitor Hitler, Down with the Traitor Communists. It is early August; they are to have a big referendum. Dissolve the Prussian Diet. Do not dissolve the Diet. There will probably be the usual murders. Will the government hold out?

On a Saturday afternoon the midsummer heat grows too strong; we slip out into the suburbs and near country. Four o’clock and tea on the terrace of the glittering new Tempelhof airport. Smart crowds watch the big planes coming in every few minutes from Moscow, Munich, Paris, London, the Riviera. There are announcers, timetables, cocktails, and modern interiors. And all around the section are new houses and settlements in brilliant concrete, with highly painted colors and chromium metal; there are long low many-family structures oriented with reference only to sun and air, proudly overriding the old enslavements of street block and car line. It is all spotless and all startling; you forget about the bankruptcy. It takes more precise examination to reveal that most of the white toylike houses are vacant, while in the fields opposite them hundreds of thousands of workers live in huts made of packing boxes and canvas. A people’s swimming pool, one hundred and fifty feet long, in the heart of the business district: more sun and air, fabulous expense. Modern churches: sermons in Wiener Werkstätte robes. Glass kindergartens: daily replacement of panes. Public laundries: incipient Communism.

Toward evening there is a shower in town, which well rids the streets of the summer dust. The inspector looks into the Friedrichstrasse: no, not clean enough. The immense new sprinkler trucks are quickly brought out, and Nature’s washing job is improved upon. It is another expensive business. The streets become so immaculate that one is hesitant about crossing them. Germany cannot meet reparations payments; Germany refuses a dirty street. In Hamburg, there are swans in the municipal park. American loans put them there. Germany cannot pay. But what! — give up the swans?

August 9 is at hand, and the threats of rioting on the day of the big referendum. It is a test of the Social-Democratic government’s strength in Prussia against the rising tides of Hitlerites and Communists. No one knows how it may come out. But everyone feels a strange air in the streets: it is hot, everything hangs in suspense and morbid expectation. Fifteen thousand special police are patrolling the city; they wear service revolvers, blackjacks, bayonets, and carbines. (Compare them with the London bobby, who carries nothing more murderous than a whistle. The two types are symbols of the two cities’ present state.)

There seem to be no disturbances in the fashionable West End of town, so we saunter over toward the famed low-brow Alexanderplatz and the revolutionary Bülowplatz. The crowds grow larger; they do not move. Ranks of police helmets glitter from patrol buses. No speeches are allowed. The streets around the Bülowplatz are heavy with idlers. The whole population seems to be waiting for something to happen — anything at all; this suspense cannot go on.

We are slowly moving into the great square. Then suddenly from somewhere begins a great commotion. What— shots? Were those shots? There is a roar of voices; police whistles blowing; hundreds are moving at quick pace toward our position. We slip along the house fronts down the square. Shouting and running. Police are forming cordons. And there — before a movie theatre, two prone figures in uniform. Next door is the editorial building of the Communist paper, the Rote Fahne. People are saying that two policemen have been killed by Communists. No — two captains of police — both shot in the forehead. Marksmen. Another has been wounded. Good God — what point in such a trick? The fellows who did it have disappeared somewhere. In a pale fury the patrolmen break up the crowd. No one is allowed out of the houses of the square. Windows are to remain shut — police shots will answer any false move. We have been careful to get out of the square. At an Aschinger fountain over a beer we talk about it all with other excited spectators. Then everything is quiet in the city; the incident closed.

On Constitution Day, soon following, Hindenburg comes down the Reichstag steps while the military bands play, and he reviews the Honor Guard of the Reichswehr. Those steel helmets remain one of the most impressive military sights of the time; they have the effect of mighty sculpture, while the French helmets look like melons and the English busbies look like a practical joke. The men stand rigid; but none stands so rigid, or keeps his back so eminently straight, as the President himself. He is in mufti — a great mistake. His left arm wanders a bit uncertainly by his side; perhaps it is groping for the sword hilt that was first placed there something over sixty years ago. . . .

Jazz tickles in the cabarets, Strauss is all but forgotten; gin replaces wine, ‘sex appeal’ is heard more often than Gemütlichkeit. And over the whole show rules the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, with its wealthy, roly-poly industrialists, its remnant East-Prussian lords, and its suaver but equally wealthy playboys from the Slav lands, all grazing calmly on the volcano of a socially chaotic, passionate, poor, unloving city. Soon we shall be hearing more of this.

III

Change about, change about, and we’re in England. Scene in the smoking room of a West End hotel that September morn on which the country goes off the gold standard: many gentlemen, many pipes, many interpretations, marvelous confusion. Probably the breakfast was too heavy, with its small steak after fried plaice after porridge after fruit; at any rate, the news is received with a deep, doubtful, and phlegmatic pull at the first tobacco. Everybody is asking, ‘What is the gold standard?’ Something is said about gold sovereigns which people used to shake down in a bag so that the coins would give off fine gold dust and chips, which could then be brought back into solid form and sold as gold: ‘sweating sovereigns’ it was called. Or, the gold standard has something to do with the fact that France went off it in 1925, and only paid back a fifth of what it owed England, as a result of the depreciation of the franc. Those Frenchmen! England always pays in full. Now, what is the gold standard?

The usual Bridget comes in to add coals to the fire; it is foggy and cold. The gentlemen seem to be amiably without business; more papers are brought in, and more explanations of the gold standard. There are headlines in red, and pictures of the Prime Minister’s coat tails flapping as he hurries back from Chequers into the door of 10 Downing Street. It is getting exciting. What is to become of the pound? Flight of the pound? Everybody reads aloud to everybody else, and the fine comb of clubmen’s discourse is passed through the entire tangle of the situation. More coals from Bridget.

Luncheon at Simpson’s is more animated than usual. Many men from the City are so wrought up that they forget to order the regular Stilton or Cheddar which must follow the saddle of mutton. And what is the gold standard?

But, gold or no gold, the changing of the guard goes on as usual. If you stop just for a moment before the palace to watch the show, an ex-service man will take you in charge immediately and try to be your guide. Dispose of him, and another comes up. About two hundred of such men wait there every morning to pounce upon the curious stranger; they are the only regular audience for the elaborate and unnecessary stamping of the companies across the forecourt of the palace and back. ‘Old Guard Halt!’ ‘New Guard Attention!’ And the ex-service man plies you with stories of the Royal Family’s habits. ‘Old Guard Present Arms!’ — glitter of red tunics and music, the ‘slow time’ march, and the neighbor’s tale of woe about unemployment, the absence of state support after a longer period of joblessness, the old story, the wife and children, the Somme.

Here come the Horse Guards down the Mall — more pomp. How much does this daily performance cost? The ex-service man senses what is going to be asked next, and he changes the subject. He leads the way to an historic pub, and, over a pint of bitter, tells stories of Edward VII, standard anecdotes. We are careful to be amused, and we give him five bob.

But no matter how interesting or changeful the current social and political conditions in England are, soon one seems to go asleep. After Paris, with its brilliantly enduring vivacity and its amiably enduring decay, after Berlin, with its mad mixture of revolution, Jewry, and the pleasure-people from all the world, this city seems anything rather than the cultural hub which one has always thought of it as being. It seems out of date — especially in a time of quick and profound transition such as this. The old formulas are become a tottering obsession. Here is His Majesty at the regular and necessary levee in St. James’s Palace, with all the officers and diplomats attendant, each lieutenant so burdened down with immense epaulets that he looks like an admiral, and everybody bowing decorously at a ceremony that is valuable merely because it is gaudy and ancient and convinces some onlookers that England is still the Britannia of more robust days. . . . Formula, formula, ignoring the impact of colossal, tragic modern fact.

No composers, few painters, less than no architects and planners, little writing beyond the weak tradition of Galsworthian fiction, and no feeling for true modern taste except in men’s clothes — what, indeed, is left to the England of 1932? This is left: the marvelous decency and fairness, so different from America, of the criminal prosecutions we attended in the Old Bailey; the ability to have set up and maintained the National Government; the Manchester Guardian; the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (just think of the name!); the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Perhaps that is not so little; perhaps for one nation that is fully enough.

IV

Across the Channel again, the Ford whisks us southward — the Ford which has been unpopular in French towns because of its American origin, and unpopular in German towns because of its French license plates; the Ford which likes to skid madly about on the fresh tar — the primitive goudronnage — of a Norman road, which made Paris to Cannes in a day, which has a great aptitude for losing the main road and landing us before charming and uncharted old oratories, bistrots, and ludicrous provincial newspaper offices where a good half hour of political fanaticism can always be overheard.

It takes us in later autumn through the battle lands; you can’t avoid them if you are headed for Strasbourg. There is Reims, horribly new, garish, decked out in tasteless cheap white plaster, redeemed only by the littleknown champagne en carafe that no other city has. There follows Châlonssur-Marne and the country eastward, where Attila once raised very hell, where Louis XVI, fleeing, was captured, where the Duke of Brunswick, in losing, made the French Revolution a success, where Moltke began rounding up the Little Napoleon, where Von Kluck did not stop, and then did. And to-day the grand old slaughterhouse of Europe is not utterly deserted; as we pass, two French divisions are faithfully rehearsing their manœuvres. Is it for sentimentality or safety?

Verdun at night is dark and silent. We sit in the café below a cheap hotel while the mechanical piano tinkles and the men still play lotto. Not a light in the countryside; a few ruined houses at our corner, the rest new and poor, the great fortress to the right. Somehow one feels as if on an island, far removed from the rest of the world — an island of fearful story, of vicious and lonely legend, where one does not dare raise one’s voice. A locomotive whistle shrieks out of the west; no other noise. The air is oppressive. We should like to leave at once, but must stay until morning.

Next day there is the indescribable bitterness of what were once the hills and valleys before the outposts of the town, and of the dank slippery passages way down in the fort of Douaumont, the guide leading the way with a torch and holding the light over what seems a crater filled with crumbled rock. When the Germans held the fort the ammunition magazine blew up — six hundred men are still buried right there under the débris. No reason to move them, you know; danger of unexploded shells. Several Frenchwomen in the party are comforted when told that 200,000 more Germans than French died in the district. Where are we? Is this 1932? We climb back to the surface, struggling for air.

Strasbourg, Strassburg — strange, unhappy border city! Speak to your hotel keeper in French, and he reproachfully answers you in German; address a post official in German, and he stiffly replies in French. The older city is purely Teutonic, with that deathless cathedral and the vast night in its transepts; with gabled houses of the Dürer period and later attempts in the provincial-Renaissance style. The new city tends toward the French, with its cafes and its garrison and its small copy of Parisian life. But to whom does the city belong? Really, it is neither German nor French; like the whole desolate dirty province of Alsace, which lies to the west, it is a weak hybrid, a doubtful region, a harsh memory, a lost world.

But a couple of hundred miles farther on things are not lost. Europe’s most care-free city is busy celebrating its Oktoberfest, tapping thousands of barrels a day of the new beer: it is the immortal Märzenbier of the immortal Munich breweries. Times are hard, but the peasants from a hundred miles around come in to town, in full costume, to spend their harvest money on the noisy three weeks’ fairgrounds. The general sobriety is only moderate. Young Americans in the crowd try vainly to compete at the shooting galleries, after two litres, with greenhatted marksmen from upcountry towns which bear such perfect winsome names as Spatzenhausen, Uglfing, Ischl, Moosach, and Patsch.

Hitler lives in town, but Munich does not really care. He is just another local attraction — like another lesser art gallery. Thomas Mann, Spengler, and a host of other intellectuals live in town, but Munich is not wildly impressed. It takes Culture rather as a matter of course. It knows that sooner or later every artist and thinker comes here to drink in the strange inspiration of its Stimmung no less than of its beer, and go home having done a chef-d’œuvre; maybe a D. H. Lawrence, or an Ibsen, or a Wagner, or just another Paris American. It knows that it is the only live centre for the remnants of the pre-war aristocracy of central Europe. It knows that (ironically enough), while being the backward capital of an almost completely agricultural province, it has created the Deutsches Museum, the greatest existing collection of scientific fact, the one complete summary of modern technological achievement — perhaps, indeed, the world’s supreme museum. This unique city is not burdened with the gravity of all these things; it is content with being pleasantly aware. If Culture and Politics grow too troublesome, it can always wipe the slate clean by merely singing in unison: ‘Bier her, Bier her, oder ich fall’ um!'

Up in the north, Communists and Hitlerites are beating each other up and the Reichsbank is having trouble after trouble. Here there is still much theatre, and skiing, and country dancing; and a most tender sympathy for the ills of the world. U. S. Steel has flopped far below 50, and the letters from home resound with wails. The Bavarians understand. They have suddenly stopped referring spitefully to America as ‘Dollaria.’ Kind of them.

V

In the second month of the year, up to Berlin, to see how the German mood grows more perturbed day by day. The sweet reasonableness of Stresemann has disappeared; Brüning struggles to appease the rising elements by an increased stiffness toward France. Across the border things have grown much less pleasant, with Tardieu (a hard-boiled journalist unloved even before the war) at the helm. Germany changed its mind with the coming of 1932: the fourth Emergency Ordinance was one iron chain too many. The murmuring gathers. The cafés are restless. The Hitler men threaten openly and carelessly. Ludendorff in his bitter retreat casts forth ever more thunderous and erratic libels.

There is still love in the country — namely, a passionate friendship for the English. (The people have not yet heard about the ruinous tariffs that England expects to put into force.) An English captain of artillery, of four years’ war service, is staying at our pension; one day while we walk down the calm venerable Tiergarten, the rows of statues shining out in the first hint of spring, he suddenly bursts out: ‘Good God, you know, I’m just beginning to realize that we English fought on the wrong side! Why — why?’ And the Germans repeat, ‘Why?’ They cannot understand; the history books cause them anguish. For the Americans these people have admiration, but friendship they reserve for their island neighbors. To the English they look for political sympathy; to us they look for political leadership. President Hoover unwilling, we don’t give it.

A restlessness enters the traveler’s bones. One wants to get home to witness the mighty tides of social change that are beginning to be felt. A feeling grows that the United States must necessarily be the hub of the developments of the future; that the European nations are so hopelessly, inextricably entangled, so burdened with a cultural past, so doubtful of the future . . . Well, we go by Lufthansa over to London: it may bring us nearer to our West.

London now in March moves exactly twice as fast as when we saw it last, half a year ago. The challenge of balancing the budget awakened the national will to serve; the realization of a falling Empire aroused millions from lethargy; and the final passionate campaign to ‘Buy British,’ leading up to the change toward protection and sky-high tariffs, whipped up a wave of patriotism almost as militant as war hysteria. Now the English congratulate themselves on their success in winning back their position; they exult in the new strength of nationalism. Sometimes they seem almost desperately determined to be enthusiastic, as they troop down Bond Street with a pipe clutched firmly between the crumbling molars.

In despair, one tries to advance the argument of internationalism; one even rings in the now fallen old English deity, Adam Smith; one calls for a decent freedom of trade, for reciprocity; one emphasizes the fact that no debts or reparations can ever be paid if there is no chance to pay in goods — exports. The gentlemen look stolidly on. And when the oration is finished, one of them remarks: ‘Young man, do you remember your SmootHawley tariff, which led the rest?’ The last of our glass of Worthington is gulped down in silence.

Things are not half as amusing as we faintly hoped they might be. The theatre also has gone ‘Buy British,’ with Noel Coward’s cheaply chauvinistic Cavalcade reigning on the boards. The anti-American sentiment in the upper circles has gone higher; all that remains Continental in such elegant West End evening resorts as the Monseigneur and the Malmaison is their French names; even the superb gowns in late hours are studiously of British origin. It is a bit stuffy.

VI

The tragic year of 1932 slips farther into its stride; we ought to be home. But here we land in Paris, with spring bursting into its fullness . . . and something seems to have happened. At last the city reveals itself. A mood grew up from nothing, as the Luxembourg came out of the gray into blossom, as the rush of early rains subsided and the tulips of the Tuileries and the RondPoint went dashing into carmine, and a thousand fountains suddenly began to play. Slowly, hesitantly, we creep out of shelters and topcoats, and make the boulevards our home: apéritifs at the eternal Deux Magots; luncheon across the street at the Brasserie Lipp (duly taking in its rarefied French writers’ atmosphere); afternoons viewing the pale horrors of the spring Salon or glancing at the worse horrors of the architecture of the newer quarters, or just having a good time wandering around the Place Dauphine, and looking forward to the gastronomical climax of the whole year in Europe, dated for to-night — a rare bottle of PulignyMontrachet with an accompaniment of canard à la Rouennaise.

The race for the Prize of the President of the Republic draws a great crowd to Auteuil on Easter Sunday: spring fashions, cameras, mutual admiration groups, and President Doumer up in the centre stand, with the white beard blowing, talking to half a dozen ladies, with Marshals in attendance, and the Dragoons of the Guard mounted outside — the sort of show that America so truly needs. The Frenchmen who hoard their money with such severity that they won’t even buy an ice box all come and heavily play the ponies; and as for the cabmen, they all try to rob you of your presumable winnings by asking two dollars for the short ride back to the centre of town.

There is to be a big election, but no one seems to take much interest. Marvelous bills are posted depicting the menacing monsters Germany and Russia, but the people do not seem to be frightened. The politicians sweat to work up an issue. There does not seem to be an issue. Happy days of isolation! True, here and there one catches a new current of anti-militarism and appeal for rapprochement; as a foreigner one does not take that agitation very seriously. Tardieu keeps on playing his somewhat unsavory game, holding up the Disarmament Conference and strengthening the alliances with slavish Slav states; he is bound to win. Strange that the public does not seem to bother one way or the other.

The afternoon of the sixth of May grows very warm. People forsake the central streets for the shade of the parks. We walk dreamily down the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré; a long distance ahead many big cars are parked, probably an official function. Then suddenly, from away off there among the cars, comes a noise, some muffled shouting, running; in a second a long limousine with men crowded on the running board careers out into the street, down some hundred feet, and then off to the left. What is it? Somebody calls out, ‘À l’Hôpital Beaujon!’ and starts walking fast. From here and there figures begin to gather and move faster down the street. There is more noise down there; some break into a run. Snatches of shouts: ‘A big reception — An accident.’ Who could it be? There is a great movement here at the place from which the car set forth. What? Who? . . . M. le Président? . . . You mean shot? . . . On l’a assassiné! . . . Non, non — pas possible! . . . Killed? . . . Somebody — his head was all bloody when they put him in the car. People stand pale, still unable to believe what passes from mouth to mouth. Doumer! . . . Why, he’d be the last man on earth. . . . Who did it? . . . Who? . . . Have they got him? . . . The head of the State. . . . No! . . . Are they calling out the guard? . . . Revolution? . . .

Crazed Gorguloff, bloody and torn, is dumped into a car and whisked away. Traffic tie-up. The gendarmes are unnerved. Women are weeping. The word has it that the President is dead. Actually he is alive, but he has only twelve hours. The thriving business of a spring afternoon suddenly goes lame, and then comes to a halt; everybody is standing at the kiosks waiting for newspapers. The Élysée Palace is surrounded by swarms. The Quai d’Orsay is still as death.

Toward evening everyone in the Quarter has the news. The White Russians are in terror, fearing prosecution or deportation and every possible trouble; they insist Gorguloff is a Communist. Some young Communists prove elaborately that Gorguloff is a White Russian. No one is convinced, everyone very embarrassed. Only the foreign cafes stay open. The press hangs on the lips of the Ministers. Finally Tardieu gives out a statement about Gorguloff’s ‘neo-Bolshevist’ activities — a propaganda phrase without any basis of fact. And now something amazing happens to the Paris papers: many of them refuse to print the official bulletin. Suddenly editors decide, on the eve of a national crisis, that they will not be bulldozed by their Premier. The government’s attempt to use this high death as a means of whipping up nationalist passions fails.

Day by day one grows more impressed by the coolness of the people. The elections are in progress, but instead of the great swing to the conservative and military Right that one had expected, more and more votes go slipping to the Left; and the last day of the voting becomes a complete Socialist victory! The assassination of their President unnerved the French, but their growing realization that they must play a coöperating rôle with Central Europe led them to a much higher path than that of blind prejudice and revenge. The intellectual realism of the French manifests itself again.

Five miles of close troops line the early morning avenues as the President is borne to the Panthéon. King Albert follows the cortège, very erect, and after him the Prince of Wales, very worn. And the new President, Lebrun, always in tears. A strictly French military show of cavalry and cannon, but accompanied by strictly German music— Beethoven’s funeral march.

And so, in a twinkling, the political picture of Europe changes. France the irreconcilable becomes France the pardoner. Under Herriot it goes out of its way to make friends and create understanding with the other side of the Rhine. It is the reverse of a year ago. And how does Germany answer? Strangely enough, it answers by the hopeless gesture of putting a narrow lot of Junkers in power to displace the open-minded Brüning. The reverse of a year ago. German policy falls into its inevitable pathos and error. On the verge of a moment of clarification, the confusion redoubles.

But now the excitements at home in America grow even greater, and Europe, with all its fascinations, diplomatic and cultural, does not seem the most fruitful ambit for a young citizen from across the seas. We should be home now, nearer to the firing line; it is a complex and fateful year as never before. ... So let us stop dining and basking and philosophizing at the café corners, and return to the serious business of living, to thoughts of the future rather than just of the present.

Thank God, there was no intentional Education during this year, but only the color of nations — color whose qualities are both light and mournful; for the life of the peoples shifts with the very seasons, and has the unpredictable movement of a Paris shower. As a traveler in Europe, one does not effectively learn; one discovers.