AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION
By MICHAEL LANGLEY
LAST May the fate of the Paris Exhibition was in the lap of the gods ; by the end of June a potential monster showed itself to be shaping well. Then in July the corners came off, the world took notice and much more would have been said in the British Press had not our own pavilion been so inadequate. Today there is no gainsaying the success of the exhibition. From the first blush of dawn until the last battery of fireworks has blazed over the Pont d'Iena every- thing is couleur de rose along the banks of the Seine.
At thirty-one gates the turnstiles have admitted close on twenty million visitors, sometimes 350,000 in a day. Pro- vincials continue to pour into Paris. Europeans of all nations, profiting by reduced fares and the carte de legitimation, have put pep into the business of hotels, shops and taxis. And beneath the Eiffel Tower, which dominates this exhibition as it dominated that of 1889, the peoples of all countries rub shoulders, some crossing to the other side of the Champ de Mars to do a round of Bulgaria, Haiti, Australia, and Iraq, some pushing back towards the Rumanian restaurant, where Danube sturgeon is to be had, or to the Anglo-Saxon " But- tery " with its Scotch salmon and its forty-five franc table d'hete meal. " Oh ! La la ! Mangez a la maison," I heard one French housewife exclaim as she looked at the prices on this menu.
Her observation left me wondering if it was made in the same critical frame of mind that characterises the French attitude towards the rising cost of living, or if there was not an undercurrent of satisfaction that there should be English people in Paris actually unable to survive the day unfortified by an entrecôte flown that morning from Smithfield. One thing was certain, only at an international exhibition repre- sentative of regions of such widely differing conceptions of the organisation of society as, for instance, the Principality of Monaco, the Kingdom of Italy and the Ukrainian Republic could prices gambol with indifference both to the laws of supply and demand and of State capitalism.
Hungarian Tokay at sixpence a glass and fresh caviar sandwiches for the same price from a buffet near the Russian pavilion provide commercial publicity in good taste ; chou- croute garnie is popular with the multitude at roughly one shil- ling a dish ; tea is less so in the Italian restaurant where the charge is ten francs a pot. But there is the widest variety, that is the great thing, variety for the mind no less than the palate—a mosaic too involved to elucidate, but which in patches is to be found reflected in the crowd.
The Yorkshireman is there, not, so he says, that he goes as a rule to exhibitions. " The wife finds them too tiring." It is all his daughter's idea, though he is " ready to admit there's something to be seen in this one." And then, from some- where along the Thames Valley, there is the family party exam- ining outboard engines, model craft and Esquimaux kayaks in the yachting section. They express regret at the absence of the two youngest who would surely be thrilled by such a show and would certainly have been brought had it been realised that behind the Canadian pavilion was a centre for minding children.
Czechoslovaks, their heads short-cropped ; Polish scouts looking • very military in long khaki cloaks ; middle-aged blondes, possibly Scandinavian but just as likely from Buchar- est ; men in white cloth caps, men in berets, women wearing- hand-embroidered Slavonic blouses ; effendi types from Algeria and Tunisia ; Belgian miners in blue boiler suits and red scarves. An unending ebb and flow of bewildered humanity edging round the guardian huissiers, pushing into pavilions already overcrowded, breaking into twos and threes to stare blindly at charts, statistics, maps and graphs, and nosing aimlessly round the critical solitary who stops to sketch an exhibit or to scan the notebooks kept by some countries for comments and suggestions.
In the terraced Japanese pavilion I found two Mont- parnasse artists skimming one of these books. " Cet erable est coquette et it plait a une canadienne," one visitor had written of a dwarf maple. Her comment took higher marks than : " I think your trees are wonderful," scrawled in a round feminine hand, but fell short of the apt observation of one critic. Everything, he found, was " merveilleux, mais it manque quelques japonnais. C'est a supposer qu'ils sont tous au front."
Yet no hint of the warlike spirit mars the decor of this pavilion. Seventy-year-old junipers and cedars that have grown only eighteen inches during a crescendo of Japanese development adorn an elegant boudoir and a tea salon in which traditional taste is modified by honourable modern simplicity. The eye wanders over a carpet of natural silk, stumbles at a violet-coloured telephone and slips away over the prevailing sheen of lacquer. It looks in vain for almond blossom and rusticity. That is left to Iraq. . . . Hanging gardens and Babylonian glamour that set one off in pursuit of more wonders, questing from the Palace of the Soviets to the Pont Alexandre III quartier, where democracy has been given a leg up and is bravely feeling its way into the air.
Opposite an enormous glass palace of Aeronautics, a rounded stream-lined building snuffing at the future in the close vicinity of the Quai d'Orsay, is the parachute tower. It stands in the centre of an attractions park and, under apparently safe conditions, has given many the thrill of making a real descent. I paid my seven francs, was taken in a lift to a height almost exactly that of the Nelson Column, fitted with shoulder and leg straps and led to the edge of a narrow platform. Far below lay the " Kingdom of Lilliput," an enclosed area inhabited by a community of dwarf residents- shop-keepers, gendarmes, even a tiny mayor. Two distant swing boats curvetted like the limbs of a high-kicking automaton performing its frenzied act within easy hearing of three tormented motor-cycle engines racing round the Wall of Death. One looked for roundabouts, but saw only a great revolving wheel with aeroplanes attached to the tips of a score of spokes, each of them describing circles in space.
It was clear that the organisers had aimed at inculcating airmindedness. But here were several more waiting to make the parachute jump. I steeled myself to walk the plank, and in a moment was sailing earthwards, pleasantly aware that this was not nearly so bad as had seemed likely in antici- pation. I descended quite gently into a world of slow-moving crowds, the interested and the apathetic, the sceptical and the gullible, the amused and the bemused wandering on a more familiar plane of switchbacks, enchanted rivers, dancing girls and doped lions. Countless attractions of this order obtruded defiantly as one strolled back to the cluster of turreted brasseries in an old-world square where tumbling boys took it turn about with amateur dancers to hold the central stage.
In the exhibition as a whole there is, though, no central stage, unless it be the broad Pont d'Iena, dominated at its four corners by the Pavilions of Great Britain and Belgium, the U.S.S.R. and Germany. Responding to the egoist in man, to a spirit which says " wherever I am there is the centre of things," each separate pavilion imposes on the visitor a personality of its own. " Nous avons une doctrine et nous sommes une force," insists Portugal from the midst of a photographic summary of industrial and agricultural activities. And that is the mildest of political boasts at an exhibition of arts, crafts and sciences which appears to cover every possible aspect of modern life.
Previous page
