Americans in Paris SIR,—As an Irishwoman who has fairly recently
spent eight months in Paris, may I say that my impression of the Americans there coincided exactly with Miss Quigly's ? Mr. Boyle quotes some of the phrases she used about Americans which most annoyed him, but only brings out how exactly they fit his countrymen as seen by an outsider. Miss Quigly, I believe, was not writing a scholarly thesis, but an admittedly individual impression. I did not mix with the transitory and moneyed variety of the species; but the check-shirted, lost, and slightly existentialist inhabitants of St. Germain-des-Pres struck me as infinitely pathetic. They pre- sented a curious parallel to the Romans visiting Athens after the conquest: avid for culture, for that certain something which they could never catch, offering money or friendship and receiving only an open palm and a cynical smile. Asked their impressions of Paris, they would burst into a disjointed lyric from which one gathered that they succeeded in living in the Paris of 1913, a Cloud Cuckoo Land of their own making. For them the gendarme dances stylised gestures on his toes, mademoiselle passes in a cloud of orchids, the sunlight catches the wine-glasses of happiness. They see it, in fact, exactly like the film An American in Paris. How do they do it ? Heaven knows, but good luck to them. They are far better off than those of us who see only the incurable disillusion expressed by the lighthearted
Previous page
