Paris Notebook
By CYRIL RAY I T was a year exactly since I had last been in Paris. That was the weekend that the trucks of the armed police were parked nose to tail in the bosky alleys off the Champs Elysees, while the men themselves—country lads, most of them— leaned against their vehicles and, having no greater warlike function to perform, eyed the pretty girls in their summer frocks, and the Fourth Republic melted in the May sunshine. Last weekend, the weather was just as warm; the chestnuts, the planes and the lime trees as fully in leaf; and the girls as pretty. All seemed as settled as if the General had been in the saddle for twelve years rather than a mere twelve months. British correspondents in Paris at a meeting admirably organised by the International Press Institute to discuss what the press could do about Franco-British tensions, reported wryly that oh, yes, their sources of infor- mation were as accessible as ever—it was just that nowadays they had no information. Except, one cautious Englishman added, for the sake of accuracy, sometimes by a coincidence. Only the General, it seems, knows what's going to happen next, because only the General decides, and I almost began to wonder whether those posters that still embrace the tree-trunks in the smarter out- skirts, such as Le Vesinet, roi . . . pourquoi pas?' might have been put up not, after all, by crackpot royalists, but by ironic commentators on the powers and the personality of the President.
There is a faint echo of the Second Empire in the insistent desire of the French, so clearl expressed in, and by, the General, to look big in the world's eyes. So there may be some special psychological significance about the success of Jean-Louis Barrault's revival of La Vie Parisienne at the Palais-Royal for a brief but glittering season that ended on Monday. (Though Offenbach's piece, first performed in 1866, was put into the dresses of the 1880s—perhaps because there ls only just room on the tiny stage for the bustles of the Third Republic, and none for the crinolines of Eugenie's court.) Along with the programme went a whole book on Offenbach and his times. and the town went mad about the operetta itself. Parisian friends marvelled that we got two seats for Friday night—a feat comparable, it seems, to dropping in at short notice on My Fair Lady. I can't remember a gayer or a prettier evening at a theatre. Barrault himself takes a smallish singing and dancing part, just for the fun of it, as does his co-director, the great Madeleine Renaud, and the whole audience looked, at the end, as though it would have joined in the final can-can, if only there had been room in the elegant little audt. torium. This production would be a tremendous success in London, comparable with The MellY Widow and Die Fledermaus. Why doesn't some. body get Jean-Louis Barrault to direct a season Gilbert and Sullivan, as soon as the copyright out?
Prices have gone up as the franc has gone down (some are already being quoted, for summer ings, in the franc lourd that will be introduced 1' July—unfamiliarly few digits followed by 111' initials FL., so that 45 F.L. means what francs means today), but it is still possible, in WO of what the pessimists always say, for holidar makers who are prepared to treat eating in Paris as an occasion, to eat well at a fair price. Not, of course, at such desperately smart places as, saY• Lasserre, which I shouldn't like to enter without about £15 in my pocket if I wanted dinner for two, and wines to match the food. Nor at that discreetly old-fashioned three-star place of Pd" grimage, next door to the very theatre I've bee° talking about, the entrance to which is in the Peristyle de Joinville, which always strikes me a sufficiently temple-like address for one of the stomach-worshippers' shrines of Europe, and which still has emblazoned on its window, in the gilt applique letters of half a century ago. the improbable legend : SHERRY .GOBLERS LEMON SQUASH ENGLISH SPOKEN No, but at my favourite bistro you can eat pate, &rut bourguignonne, and a great wedge' from a delectable home-made strawberry tart, with carafe wine, for 15s. And a wedding' anniversary dinner at a solidly old-fashioned family-run restaurant near the Bourse, which 110 had a well-earned Michelin star for years, cost not much more 44.in £3 for the two of us--- asparagus, fillets of sole in a cream sauce special to the house, salads and strawberries and creanit and liqueurs with the coffee. We drank the carafe wine—food is so good in Paris that 1 am los ambitious about the wine than I am at home--and fine wine might have added something less than it pound to the total. Still not an outrageous Price for a special treat.
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