Some Parisian Insides and Outsides
On a Paris Roundabout. Text by and Drawn by Jan Gordon. (Lane. 12s. 6d.)
Twenty Years in Paris with a Pen. By Sommerville Story, Illustrated. (Rivers. 15s.)
MANY times have we met Jan Gordon—in Serbia where the prunes come from, sitting outside in a Spanish street by moonlight and playing the guitar as the villagers dance upon the cobblestones, and roaming round Languedoc to-day and Lapland yesterday. In fact a systematic bird of passage and a professional Bohemian, always on the wander, but wherever he wanders always managing jo get inside the soul of the people he happens to be amongst. Just after the War had destroyed the painting connexion of himself and his wife, and before their books had begun to pay, they found themselves in Paris and in a condition which demanded
circumspection in household economy and a judicious care in choosing the right-priced restaurants, when a happy chance led them to the Restaurant Chatelain " in a most
apaehey '-looking backwater of a square." (That restaurant will not now be found by the curious gastronome.) Round the patronne of this House of Humble Gourmets—black-clad and truculent-looking, ultimately proving all that there is of the most kind-hearted and generous, engagingly foul- mouthed (le mot de Cambronne, ever so discreetly indicated, always on her lips), but in the kitchen a supreme artist—the gay threads of the story weave themselves. Here you shall read of the wicked life and savoury death of a ferocious apache- like rabbit, called Landru, who made miserable the life of an Alsatian wolf-dog ; of the care-free lives of fellow-artists ; of models male (for Cardinals and d'Artagnans) and female
(for Leda and Europa), and all with more or less dislocated morals ; and you shall learn the real right way to cook snails. To your nostrils will be' recalled the characteristic smell of Paris, as reminiscent in its way as any that the Fast can brew, and, when you have finished the book (as you will with pleasure) you will have got a glimpse of how the mean streets of Paris live and what they talk about.
- In contrast to the warmth and colour of Jan Gordon is the book of Mr. Story, who was for some years editor of the Paris edition of the Daily Mail, in which capacity he was described by Lord Northcliffe as " the most Parisian of English journalists." But not Parisian in the same sense as Jan Gordon, who loves Paris for its human living self, while to Mr. Story it is rather so much good copy, and a
succession of "Franco-British circles." Mr. Story, for instance, writes of Besnard, the painter—" I have met numbers of the most distinguished artists of France at his-studio, where he does the honours with simple grace beside his wife, a dis- tinguished sculptress." Such writing is just a little flat ; there is in it no flavour of real life. But of that we do get some small smack when the author attends the orgiastic Bal des Quat'z' Arts, though Mr. Story's view of French life is mostly from the outside. However, the book contains plenty of reminiscences of well-known people like Camille de Sainte-Croix, Rejane, Kemal Pasha, Melba, and of course Lord Northcliffe.
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