Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    About Paris
    About Paris
    About Paris
    Ebook152 pages2 hours

    About Paris

    By Richard Harding Davis

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "About Paris" by Richard Harding Davis. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGood Press
    Release dateDec 2, 2019
    ISBN4057664574176
    About Paris
    Author

    Richard Harding Davis

    Richard Davis was born and educated in Melbourne and now lives in Queensland. He was encouraged in his writing by Alan Marshall, Ivan Southall and later, Nobel prize-winning author Patrick White. Richard pursued a successful career in commerce before taking up full-time writing in 1997. Since then his published works have included three internationally acclaimed biographies of musicians: Geoffrey Parsons - Among Friends (ABC Books), Eileen Joyce: A Portrait (Fremantle Press) and Anna Bishop - The Adventures of an Intrepid Prima Donna (Currency Press). The latest in this series is Wotan’s Daughter - The Life of Marjorie Lawrence.

    Read more from Richard Harding Davis

    Related to About Paris

    Related ebooks

    Travel For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The New Normal

      Jun 3, 2020

      The New Normal
      3 min read

    • Article

      Paris Was Yesterday

      Mar 10, 2021

      THE lane between the farm and the village was still half underwater, so my husband, jabbed weeks ago, insisted on driving me to the village hall in his pickup truck. We loaded up like an old couple going on a day trip to the seaside, me with a Thermo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Dec 1, 2019

      Table Talk
      12 min read

    • Article

      Dignity and Decorum (1996)

      Jun 1, 2022

      Dignity and Decorum (1996)
      3 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      Three Outsiders In Makhanda

      Nov 24, 2023

      Three Outsiders In Makhanda
      9 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of Lost Paris

      Oct 19, 2022

      I sympathise with Oscar Wilde, ill in his room at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris, when he complained that he was fighting a duel to the death with his wallpaper. ‘One of us has to go,’ he decided. Left Bank wallpapers have not improved, as I discovered

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sin

      Sep 3, 2019

      By the last week of April, the parking lot’s long chainlink fence already bristles with its hundreds of attachments: coiled wire, duct tape, butterfly clips, boat hooks, coat hangers, pellets of industrial glue, nylon strips, braided strings, and wha

      29 min read

    • Article

      A Love Letter To Norfolk

      Apr 27, 2022

      A Love Letter To Norfolk
      5 min read

    • Article

      Document

      Mar 23, 2023

      n"This book encapsulates everything I loved about Soho. It's about what was an underbelly of London, where everything came together - underground drinking places, an eccentric literary scene, sex, everything Soho represented at that time. I started w

      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer In The City

      May 30, 2023

      Summer In The City
      2 min read

    • Article

      Adrift in Sunlit Night

      Jun 1, 2020

      Adrift in Sunlit Night
      20 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 4, 2018

      In London. England. Who knows why?Perhaps this rumpled guyFrom central casting or a page of Dickens.He’s taking ordinary usTo haunts of the illustrious,Where even dull pulse quickens. A red felt hat’s dark fingered brim,Food-spotted vest are—him.A mo

      4 min read

    • Article

      In Paddy's footsteps

      Dec 14, 2022

      I wonder what Paddy Leigh Fermor would have made of it. The doyen of travel writers, a dedicated pedestrian who trudged across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople and always embraced St Augustine's creed of solvitur ambulando – it is so

      5 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Sep 29, 2022

      ONE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT most people would be rather flattered to find themselves described as “the chosen ones”, but not so the “international aesthetes” who according to a French magazine are injecting new life into Venice. Like all cosmopolitan citi

      3 min read

    • Article

      1887 Vrc Derby

      Sep 30, 2021

      1887 Vrc Derby
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ciao Cetara!

      Mar 1, 2018

      Ciao Cetara!
      4 min read

    • Article

      Following in Her Footsteps

      Mar 24, 2020

      Following in Her Footsteps
      5 min read

    • Article

      OreoArroyo

      Jul 6, 2021

      WHEN THE STRIPPER STRUTTED INTO THE LIBRARY, SHE COULDN’T hide her dismay. Probably, she and her bodyguard expected a bachelor party or investment bankers celebrating a big deal at the mansion overlooking the Newport Coast. She wouldn’t have anticipa

      21 min read

    • Article

      TALES From The RIVERBANK

      Sep 26, 2024

      TALES From The RIVERBANK
      7 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    • Article

      In Pursuit Of Portugal

      Oct 16, 2018

      In Pursuit Of Portugal
      9 min read

    • Article

      On The King’s Road To Ruin

      Oct 31, 2024

      On The King’s Road To Ruin
      3 min read

    • Article

      A SONG for Europe

      Feb 20, 2020

      A SONG for Europe
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for About Paris

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      About Paris - Richard Harding Davis

      Richard Harding Davis

      About Paris

      Published by Good Press, 2022

      [email protected]

      EAN 4057664574176

      Table of Contents

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      ABOUT PARIS

      II THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS NIGHT

      III PARIS IN MOURNING

      IV THE GRAND PRIX AND OTHER PRIZES

      V AMERICANS IN PARIS

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Table of Contents

      ABOUT PARIS

      Table of Contents

      I

      THE STREETS OF PARIS

      The

      street that I knew best in Paris was an unimportant street, and one into which important people seldom came, and then only to pass on through it to the Rue de Rivoli, which ran parallel with it, or to the Rue Castiglione, which cut it evenly in two. It was to them only the shortest distance between two points, for the sidewalks of this street were not sprinkled with damp sawdust and set out with marble-topped tables under red awnings, nor were there the mirrors and windows of jewellers and milliners along its course to make one turn and look. It was interesting only to those people who lived upon it, and to us perhaps only for that reason. If you judged it by the circumstance that we all spent our time in hanging out of the windows, and that the concierge of each house stood continually at the front door, you would suppose it to be a most interesting thoroughfare, in which things were always happening. What did happen was not interesting to the outsider, and you had to live in it some time before you could appreciate the true value of the street. With one exception. This was the great distinction of our street, and one of which we were very proud. A poet had lived in his way, and loved in his way, in one of the houses, and had died there. You could read the simple, unromantic record of this in big black letters on a tablet placed evenly between the two windows of the entresol. It gave a distinguished air to that house, and rendered it different from all of the others, as a Legion of Honor on the breast of a French soldier makes him conspicuous amongst his fellows.

      ALFRED DE MUSSET

      né à Paris

      Le 11 Décembre 1810

      est mort

      dans cette maison

      Le 2 Mai 1857

      THE CONCIERGE OF EACH HOUSE STOOD CONTINUALLY AT THE FRONT DOOR

      We were all pleased when people stopped and read this inscription. We took it as a tribute to the importance of our street, and we felt a proprietary interest in that tablet and in that house, as though this neighborly association with genius was something to our individual credit.

      We had other distinguished people in our street, but they were very much alive, and their tablets were colored ones drawn by Chéret, and pasted up all over Paris in endless repetition; and though their celebrity may not live as long as has the poet's, while they are living they seem to enjoy life as fully as he did, and to get out of the present all that the present has to give.

      The one in which we all took the most interest lived just across the street from me, and by looking up a little you could see her looking out of her window, with her thick, heavy black hair bound in bandeaux across her forehead, and a great diamond horseshoe pinned at her throat, and with just a touch of white powder showing on her nose and cheeks. She looked as though she should have lived by rights in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and she used to smile down rather kindly upon the street with a haughty, tolerant look, as if it amused her by its simplicity and idleness, and by the quietness, which only the cries of the children or of the hucksters, or the cracking at times of a coachman's whip, ever broke. She looked very well then, but it was in the morning that the street saw her at her best. For it was then that she went out to ride in the Bois in her Whitechapel cart, and as she never awoke in time, apparently, we had the satisfaction of watching the pony and the tiger and cart for an hour or two until she came. It was a brown basket-cart, and the tiger used to walk around it many times to see that it had not changed in any particular since he had examined it three minutes before, and the air with which he did this gave us an excellent idea of the responsibility of his position. So that people passing stopped and looked too—bakers' boys in white linen caps and with baskets on their arms, and commissionnaires in cocked hats and portfolios chained to their persons, and gentlemen freshly made up for the morning, with waxed mustaches and flat-brimmed high hats, and little girls with plaits, and little boys with bare legs; and all of us in-doors, as soon as we heard the pony stamp his sharp hoofs on the asphalt, would drop books or razors or brooms or mops and wait patiently at the window until she came.

      When she came she wore a black habit with fresh white gloves, holding her skirt and crop in one hand, and the crowd would separate on either side of her. She did not see the crowd. She was used to crowds, and she would pat the pony's head or rub his ears with the fresh kid gloves, and tighten the buckle or shift a strap with an air quite as knowing as the tiger's, but not quite so serious. Then she would wrap the lap-robe about her, and her maid would take her place at her side with the spaniel in her arms, and she would give the pony the full length of the lash, and he would go off like a hound out of the leash. They always reached the corner before the tiger was able to overtake them, and I believe it was the hope of seeing him some morning left behind forever which led to the general interest in their departure. And when they had gone, the crowd would look at the empty place in the street, and at each other, and up at us in the windows, and then separate, and the street would grow quiet again. One could see her again later, if one wished, in the evening, riding a great horse around the ring, in another habit, but with the same haughty smile; and as the horse reared on his hind-legs, and kicked and plunged as though he would fall back on her, she would smile at him as she did on the children in our street, with the same unconcerned, amused look that she would have given to a kitten playing with its tail.

      The houses on our street had tall yellow fronts with gray slate roofs, and roof-gardens of flowers and palms in pots. Some of the houses had iron balconies, from which the women leaned and talked across the street to one another in purring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the r's and an occasional disdainful movement of the shoulders. When any other than a French woman shrugs her shoulders she moves the whole upper part of her body, from the hips up; but the French woman's shoulders and arms are all that change when she makes that ineffable gesture that we have settled upon as the characteristic one of her nation.

      SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET

      In a street of like respectability to ours in London or New York those who lived on it would know as little of their next-door neighbor as of a citizen at another end of the town. The house fronts would tell nothing to the outside world; they would frown upon each other like family tombs in a cemetery; but in this street of Paris the people lived in it, or on the balconies, or at the windows. We knew what they were going to have for dinner, because we could see them carrying the uncooked portions of it from the restaurant at the corner, with a long loaf of bread under one arm and a single egg in the other hand; and when some one gave a fête we knew of it by the rows of bottles on the ledge of the window and the jellies set out to cool on the balcony. We were all interested in the efforts of the stout gentleman in the short blue smoking-jacket who taught his parrot to call to the coachman of each passing fiacre; he did this every night after dinner, with his cigarette in his mouth, and with great patience and good-nature. We took a common pride also in the flower-garden of the young people on the seventh floor, and in their arrangement of strings upon which the vines were to grow, and in the lines of roses, which dropped their petals whenever the wind blew, upon the head of the concierge, so that she would look up and shake her head at them, and then go inside and get a broom and sweep the leaves carefully away. When any one in our street went off in his best clothes in a fiacre we looked after him with envy, and yet with a certain pride that we lived with such fortunate people, who were evidently much sought after in the fashionable world; and when a musician or a blind man broke the silence of our street with his music or his

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1