PARIS LETTER
THIS is my first letter to the readers of The Dial: in a way my credential letter. I have composed it myself so I can have no assurance in presenting it, certainly not the assurance, common in such cases, of knowing that though the letter be sealed it speaks well of the bearer.
It is a real effort for me because I write only to indifferent people and almost never to my friends (friends being those with whom you do not have to keep up relations because you know you can count on them). And to-day, when autographs fetch such high prices at auction, a writer owes it to himself to write still less, so as not to lower the rate.
In other days it took a Parisian to speak competently of Paris. But we are no longer in the Paris of the past; undoubtedly that is why the task is now confided to one who has lived so much abroad that the description of his birthplace is exoticism. However, Paris has itself become so much a stranger to its proper genius that I find myself more at home than I should after long absences. Where is the labyrinth of the old streets of the Latin Quarter? Where are the great gardens destroyed by the Boulevard Raspail? Where is the gentle slope of the Champs-Elysées without palaces, without dressmakers with Russian names, where the first modern shop, an automobile agency, installed itself, to the scandal of the quarter, at the corner of the rue Marbeuf where I was born? A Paris so delicate, so unaudacious, gay in the evening with its shops open late and its cafés regretfully closing at two in the morning—Paris of 1895, of Sarah Bernhardt and of Robert de Montesquiou. I see myself again in the rented coupé (de l'Epatant) which took me as a child down the Boulevard Pereire to the hôtel of "Madame Sarah." In a salon which smelled of lilacs I see again that fine profile painted by Bastien-Lepage, the body already heavy with its fifty years, lying on the skin of some wild animal, surrounded with flowers. As I came in, dressed in a black velvet suit, and frightened because of the lions which, they told me, roamed the house, Sarah
