On Paris

On Paris

‘on’

Ernest Hemingway

‘on’

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street London W1W 5PF www.hesperus.press

First published in The Toronto Star, 1922–3

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2010

This edition published in 2025

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-604-8

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-84391-330-6

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

On Paris

Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris

Poincaré’s Folly

Clemenceau Politically Dead

Paris Is Full of Russians

Papal Poll: Behind the Scenes

Wives Buy Clothes for French Husbands

Poincaré’s Election Promises

Sparrow Hat on Paris Boulevards

Black Novel a Storm Center

American Bohemians in Paris

Wild Night Music of Paris

The Mecca of Fakers

M. Deibler, A Much-Feared Man

95,000 Wear the Legion of Honor

Active French Anti-Alcohol League

Parisian Boorishness

A Veteran Visits the Old Front

The Great ‘Apéritif’ Scandal

Rug Vendors in Paris

Did Poincaré Laugh in Verdun Cemetery?

Homes on the Seine

A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight

The Franco-German Situation

French Royalist Party

Government Pays for News

Gargoyles as Symbol

European Nightlife: A Disease

Christmas in Paris

Biographical Note

On Paris

Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris

The Toronto Star Weekly, 4th February 1922

Paris. – Paris in the winter is rainy, cold, beautiful and cheap. It is also noisy, jostling, crowded and cheap. It is anything you want – and cheap.

The dollar, either Canadian or American, is the key to Paris. With the US dollar worth twelve and a half francs and the Canadian dollar quoted at something over eleven francs, it is a very effective key.

At the present rate of exchange, a Canadian with an income of one thousand dollars a year can live comfortably and enjoyably in Paris. If exchange were normal the same Canadian would starve to death. Exchange is a wonderful thing.

Two of us are living in a comfortable hotel in the Rue Jacob. It is just back of the Academy of the Beaux Arts and a few minutes’ walk from the Tuileries. Our room costs twelve francs a day for two. It is clean, light, well heated, has hot and cold running water and a bathroom on the same floor. That makes a cost for rent of thirty dollars a month.

Breakfast costs us both two francs and a half. That totals seventy-five francs a month, or about six dollars and three or four cents. At the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue Jacob there is a splendid restaurant where the prices are à la carte. Soup costs sixty centimes and a fish is 1.20 francs. The meals are roast beef, veal cutlet, lamb, mutton and thick steaks served with potatoes prepared as only the French can cook them. These cost 2.40 francs an order. Brussels sprouts in butter, creamed spinach, beans, sifted peas, and cauliflower vary in price from forty to eighty-five centimes. Salad is sixty centimes. Desserts are seventy-five centimes and sometimes as much as a franc. Red wine is sixty centimes a bottle and beer is forty centimes a glass.

My wife and I have an excellent meal there, equal in cooking and quality of food to the best restaurants in America, for fifty cents apiece. After dinner you can go anywhere on the subway for four cents in American money or take a bus to the farthest part of the city for the same amount. It sounds unbelievable but it is simply a case of prices not having advanced in proportion to the increased value of the dollar.

All of Paris is not so cheap, however, for the big hotels located around the Opera and the Madeleine are more expensive than ever. We ran into two girls from New York the other day in the Luxembourg Gardens. All of us crossed on the same boat, and they had gone to one of the big, highly advertised hotels. Their rooms were costing them sixty francs a day apiece, and other charges in proportion. For two days and three nights at their hotel they received a bill for five hundred francs, or forty-two dollars. They are now located in a hotel on the left bank of the Seine, where five hundred francs will last two weeks instead of two days, and are as comfortable as they were at the tourist hotel.

It is from tourists who stop at the large hotels that reports come that living in Paris is very high. The big hotelkeepers charge all they think the traffic can bear. But there are several hundred small hotels in all parts of Paris where an American or Canadian can live comfortably, eat at attractive restaurants and find amusement for a total expenditure of two and one half to three dollars a day.

Poincaré’s Folly

The Toronto Daily Star, 4th February 1922

Paris. – Canadian interest in European politics is as dead as a bucket of ashes. There are plenty of politics in Canada, and the good Canadian is sick of old-world tangles that are merely older and dirtier than the Dominion product. But all people who were in the war are interested in the inside reason for the turn of events that has cost France the sympathy of the world.

When the armistice came, France occupied the strongest moral position any country could hold. People spoke of The soul of France. France was immaculate. And then came the peace conference of Versailles.

The world condoned the French attitude at the peace conference because the war was so recent and France had suffered so much that it seemed natural for her to make an unjust, conqueror’s peace. It was Clemenceau’s peace, his last tigerish move, for now Clemenceau is the deadest name in France. But it was an understandable peace, with the war so recent, and a forgivable peace.

Now the Versailles peace is a long time back, the war is over. Germany is making an earnest effort to build up her country to pay the money she owes the Allies and England is trying to help Germany that she may be able to pay. It is to France’s interest to see that Germany has a chance to pay, and she must see that the economic recovery of Germany is necessary if Europe is ever to get back to normal. But France keeps an enormous standing army, rattles the saber against Germany, destroys the effect of the Washington limitation of armament conference by adopting a Prussian attitude about submarines and talks of the next war.

Nobody that had anything to do with this war wants to talk about another war. Least of all should France want there to be a next war. The French people do not want any war. But, at present, the French