FRANCE: Success!

The seven-millionth visitor had his ticket punched at the Paris Exposition of 1937 last week and experts agreed it was rapidly reaching historic rank with the great French expositions of the past. Greatest of these was Paris 1900, attended by thirty-nine millions before closing day. but a worthy successor was Paris 1931 with thirty-three and a half millions. On May 23 only four pavilions were ready when Paris 1937 was “inaugurated” by sad-eyed, droop-mustached French President Albert Lebrun, but last week 160 pavilions were complete and the Exposition was all but finished. Wiseacres agreed that a solid month of sightseeing would be necessary to make a thorough job of Paris 1937 and that this week the one word for it was “SUCCESS.”

Paris hotels were all more nearly full than at any time since 1929. Best rooms were taken, but rooms of sorts were still available to late comers, and the Government were rigidly keeping prices reasonable. Since Paris is the capital of fashion, females from all over the world are now swarming daily into the Exposition’s Pavilion d’Elégance, but most of the great French creators of style are a match for them. Never accustomed hitherto to showing their latest models to the vulgar public, they have created for the Exposition dresses too breathtakingly extreme, fantastic and sumptuous to be worn by one woman in a million, show them mostly on featureless-faced mannequins rough-hewn of pinkish beige plaster, some as disproportioned as surrealism. Barely practical are the clothes shown by Paris conservatives such as Alix, Worth and Lelong. Scorning plaster women, Lanvin has draped two gowns of medieval inspiration and some handsome furs on a gigantic horse and an heraldic lion. Rebel Schiaparelli, outdoing even this, has flung a plaster female stark naked.* bottom down on a beach rug of artificial flowers, tossed the costume on a beach chair. Since such capers by the aristocrats of haute couture are not intended to please everyone, Paris’ great department store Le Louvre is handy at the Exposition, selling French dresses of good ready-to-wear quality and style at moderate prices. Example: at 2,200 francs ($80) Le Louvre last week offered a striking white Cellophane backless evening dress, the front bodice and hips covered with white sequins applied like fishscales and trailing off into a fishtail train.

The Exposition offers no French motor cars, but at 15,000 francs or $560 was offered last week the two-cylinder 32 h. p. Taupin monoseater sport plane, built for safe piloting by amateurs and said to be capable of landing at a speed of only 12½ m. p. h. Slightly larger French sport planes, carrying two, yet also geared to private purchasers in the lowest price class are offered at $900 with a ceiling of 18,000 feet, cruising speed of 105 m. p. h.

Since mechanically-minded Europeans go in much more heavily for theory and mathematics than mechanically-minded Americans, the Exposition’s huge Palace of Discovery is full of French professors who have sacrificed their summer holidays to stand behind scientific apparatus of all sorts. They perform elaborately delicate experiments, eagerly dispute with an amazing number of shabbily dressed persons from all parts of Europe who have managed to get to Paris for this high-powered intellectual carnival. Among French scientists who have collaborated to make and staff the Palace of Discovery is Mine Curie-Joliot, eminent chemist daughter of the discoverer of radium. One completely round room exhibits the mathematical symbol pi (ordinarily figured as equal to 3,1416) worked out to such a length that the resulting decimal winds three times around the room. At intervals is heard a phonograph transcription of a short lecture by one of France’s greatest mathematicians, briefly outlining a few of the countless facts which centuries of mathematical discovery and reasoning have amassed around the symbol pi.

This week at the Exposition less brainy sightseers had huge fun bargaining with native bazaar-keepers, sampling exotic perfumes and avidly whiffing strange smells on the long island in the Seine upon which France has strung like so many pearls her overseas colonies. Muddy, reeking with pungent coffee and spices and exceedingly popular are the North African bazaars whose keepers seem to scream and haggle the loudest when not flattering and blandishing the most seductively. Especially beautiful are the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian quarters with their tinkling fountains, warmly atmospheric patios, fakirs and camels. On hot days, Equatorial and Occidental African craftsmen were stinking convincingly last week as they fashioned their wares amid incipient squalor which seemed to make them more at home at the Exposition each day. Biggest was the civilized white crowd around a coal-black East African Negro cloth weaver who chants a weird native jazz in time with the squeaking of his loom pedals, the clanking of his bone shuttle.

Many U. S. travelers have known vaguely for years that somewhere in Paris stands a replica 20 ft. tall of the 152 ft. Statue of Liberty presented by France to the U. S. in 1886. Hitherto seen chiefly by bargemen on the Seine, the replica of Liberty, standing where it has stood since 1889, now is an unexpected feature of a visit to the Exposition’s Colonial Section. Sturdy French and middle-class visitors generally had about decided last week that the place to go for hearty food and sound wines was the Brasserie des Metiers. Also crowded were the Midway joints for Alsatian sauerkraut. Even so the majority of Europeans were bringing their own lunches and dinners to the Exposition last week, staying all day to get maximum money’s worth for the admission charge of six francs (25¢). Smart U. S. citizens just landed from the French Line’s Normandie, jampacked last week the Exposition’s small, select Restaurant La Normandie. whose manager is the ship’s Associate Purser John Henry. Smartest large restaurant is Le Roi George with two orchestras and Maitre d’Hotel Albert of Maxim’s. Swankly atop the Pavilion d’Elegance perches the Ritz-Hotel-managed Club des Oiseaux (Birds’ Club).

Definitely eyesores at Paris 1937 are the bleakly and blankly modernistic pavilions of undistinguished size and cluttered interiors which misrepresent the U. S. and United Kingdom. Even the nearby Canadian building, largely devoted to a tasteful showing of excellent photographs of the Great Open Spaces, is better. Sadly, Britain’s great Liberal daily Manchester Guardian recently observed: “The external architecture of the British pavilion is that of a plain white biscuit-tin . . . except for a glass pane with a highly conventional and sour-looking Britannia.”

The U. S. pavilion was considered so bad that most French editors passed it over in polite silence. Privately the Paris consensus seemed to be last week: “It contains none of the American products famous in France, no motorcars, no silk stockings, no reasonably priced ready-made dresses, no cheap-but-good shoes.” Most appreciated exhibit seemed to be the Aetna Life Insurance Co.’s so-called “Steerometer and Reactometer,” a gadget on which visitors could test their fitness to drive a car. Unexplained last week was a heavily draped pool table. A bust of John D. Rockefeller Sr. stared at a bust of Mahatma Gandhi by Jo Davidson. On tables were perspective models of Boulder Dam and an artificially moonlit Triborough Bridge, with space reserved for a coming model of the New York Exposition of 1939. After this visitors are ready for the Wine Fountain spouting real wine but not the vintages of the famed French chateaux which adorn it in symbolic model form.

Key point at which to enter Paris 1937 is the hopefully green Peace Tower at the gate formed by the two great marble wings of the new Trocadero Palace, this to be a permanent structure housing Paris art exhibits of the highest class. From it visitors descend broad steps with the Eiffel Tower rising ahead of them across the Seine, on their left the massive German pavilion with its brooding Nazi eagle, on their right the flamboyant Soviet pavilion topped by excited proletarian figures, and before them a great basin of foaming fountains, flanked by assorted foreign pavilions. Massive-pillared Egypt is a heavy splash of deep red; Rumania scintillates with a faqade of rare stone from her rich mines; Austria is a building the whole front of which is a glass serving to frame a gigantic photograph at the rear, so that one seems to look not at a structure but at Alpine heights; and Norway is all beer, fur and skis. Beyond lies Italy, a pavilion where oranges and lemons arrive each day so completely ripe and fresh from the groves, that no sugar is used in either the orangeade or lemonade. Sour are huge propaganda pictures showing such “atrocities” as Ethiopian blacks lashed by the whips of Haile Selassie’s executioners before Italy won her Empire with bombs and gas.

To fill the Museum of Modern Art, France has not only ransacked her best collections but caused even the Bank of France to disgorge a few masterpieces from its ornate salons, sacred hitherto to such connoisseurs as Dr. Schacht. Cabled hard-boiled Manhattan Sunman Henry McBride, last week after looking out from the new Trocadero Palace: “Surely the view one gets from this terrace is one of the most glittering and stirring prospects now to be obtained anywhere in the world.”

Superlatives, Most popular pavilion at the Exposition to judge from the number of visitors thus far: Belgium’s. . . . Price of the Van Cleef & Arpels brooch of overlapping leaves in small diamonds and rubies duplicating one bought by the Duke of Windsor for his Duchess: 225,000 francs ($8,300). . . . Greatest achievement from the standpoint of Exposition engineering: although the fair is in the very centre of Paris, normal city traffic is not interfered with, passes through subterranean tunnels or overhead bridges which completely avoid exposition structures or traffic. . . . Most irrepressibly Parisian novelty shown: a pair of women’s patent leather pumps with the tongues representing Leon Blum wearing a red tie, these shoes priced at 1,000 francs ($37.50) the pair and displayed to the public in a bird cage.

*U.S. dry-goods store window dressers have always quickly aped every Paris exposition and last week in Manhattan swank Saks-Fifth Avenue filled its windows with similar naked mannequins and fur coats flung about. Result: most women walkers on Fifth Avenue hurried past the little knots who gathered to gaze and scoff.