The Last Time I Saw Paris by Elliot Paul

Author:Elliot Paul [Paul, Elliot]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781780600031
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The Pre-War Thirties

Excerpts from a Series of Letters

[Received by the writer in Madrid, Alicante, Barcelona, Palma de Majorca and Santa Eulalia, Ibiza, Spain, from residents of the rue de la Huchette, Paris, France, from July 1931 to November 1934.]

THIS PERIOD WAS MY longest absence from the rue de la Huchette in the course of the past eighteen years. So from the time of the Spanish revolution that unseated Alfonso until just after the United States had recognized the sixteen-year-old revolution in Russia I had to depend for news of my friends in Paris on their own talent for letter writing and what I could read between the lines of the corrupt and scattered French press. On the island of Ibiza I received the Paris papers two or three weeks late, but I had plenty of leisure in which to read them and assimilate their contents.

A city one loves exists at no matter what distance, and its symphony is sometimes heard more clearly when one is away, as the music of an orchestra is more lucid to an audience than it sounds to the performers on the stage. Had I been in another European country, the local events might have confused me and blurred my understanding of the Parisian scene. But France was decaying Europe, and Spain was an awakening new world. The Pyrenees and not the Straits of Gibraltar form the real boundary between the continents. The short journey from Biarritz to Burgos this very day takes one back across a gulf of about six centuries.

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