PARIS VISTAS
The Invalides from Pont Alexandre III
PARIS VISTAS
BY
HELEN DAVENPORT GIBBONS
Author of "A Little Gray Home in France,"
"Red Rugs of Tarsus," etc.
WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
LESTER GEORGE HORNBY
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1919
Copyright, 1919, by
THE CENTURY CO.
———
Published, December, 1919
TO
A CRITIC
WHO LIVED MOST
OF THESE DAYS
WITH ME
FOREWORD
Webster defines a vista as "a view, especially a distant view, throughor between intervening objects." If I were literal-minded, I suppose Ishould either abandon my title or make this book a series ofdescriptions of Sacré Coeur, crowning Montmartre, as you see thechurch from dark gray to ghostly white, according to the day, at the endof apartment-house-lined streets from the allée of the Observatoire,from the Avenue Montaigne, from the rue de Solférino, and from the RueTaitbout. I ought to be writing about the vistas, than which no othercity possesses a more beautiful and varied array, that feature the Arcde Triomphe, the Trocadéro, the Tour Eiffel, the Grande Roue, theInvalides, the Palais Bourbon, the Madeleine, the Opéra, Saint-Augustin,Val de Grâce and the Panthéon.
But may not one's vistas be memories, with the years acting as"intervening objects"? Has not distance as much to do with time as withspace? Vistas in words can no more convey the impression of things seenthan Lester Hornby's sketches. If you want a substitute for Baedeker,please do not read this book! If you want a substitute for photographs,you will be disappointed in Lester's sketches.
The monuments of Paris, ticketed by name and historical events totourists whose eyes have had hardly more time than the camera, known byphotographs to prospective tourists who dream of things as yet unseen,are interwoven into the canvas of my life. The Gare Saint-Lazaire, forinstance, is the place where I was lost once as a kid, where I have hadto say goodbye to my husband starting on a long and perilous journey,and over which I have seen a Zeppelin floating. Since Louis Philippe waslong before my time, the obelisk always has been in the Place de laConcorde. And when you pass it, your eyes, meeting the Arc de Triompheat the end of the Champs-Elysées, the Carrousel at the end of theTuileries, the Madeleine at the end of the Rue Royale and the PalaisBourbon at the end of the bridge, record vistas as natural, as familiaras your mother's face in the doorway of the childhood home. Where elsecould the Arc de Triomphe