Paris France by Gertrude Stein

Author:Gertrude Stein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

PART

IV

I LIKE WORDS of one syllable and it works out very well in the French order for general mobalisation. The printed thing gives all the detail and then it says the army de terre, de mer et de l’air. That is very impressive when you read it in every village.

It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to to-day. It would be a puzzle this if it were not that it is true that the world is round and that space is illimitable unlimited. I suppose it is that that makes the intellectual so anxious for a regimenting government which they could so ill endure.

And so war comes and it has its advantages, it does make a concentration of isolation, there are so many more people, animals and fowls and children in wartime than in peace-time, but it does all make for a concentration of isolation and this is interesting.

And old French friend, Madame Pierlot once said to me she is now eighty-eight and she said that she is so much more flattered now than when she was a fascinating young woman. Fitzgerald once said to me it is easy to charm the old. But that is not the whole story it is easy for the old to charm.

Perhaps this war will make ages reasonable again, the last war completely destroyed ages, and I suppose life inevitably is calmer if there are ages.

Which makes this war real again. Uniforms say the French make every one younger and then when you take the uniform off it makes everybody just that much older. In the last war uniforms were worn so long that that consciousness was lost but now more uniforms come off and on, mobilisation and demobilisation takes place more frequently, as Bernard Fay just wrote I have come back to Paris and so many of my friends have been demobilised and it makes them feel rather sheepish.

And so ages have come into existence again.

But then there was the mistake about Kiki Vincent.

Madame Chaboux told it to me. It is she who cooked jugged hare better than anybody else in the region, and it was she who told how she and her husband and two friends went to an inn for dinner where they made a specialty of jugged hare and as the dish was presented to them and the hush fell upon them the hush with which French people always receive a dish, the friend half crying said but they have not left us any morceaux ronds, there was nothing there but shoulders and legs and heads, there were no round pieces, the round pieces that so deliciously are made by the centre of the animal. So now we never see a jugged hare without thinking of the morceaux ronds whose non-appearance is a poignant grief.

We

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