Book Description

ÊFor two weeks we had been lodging temporarily in the top of a comfortable little hotel, called the Grand something (most of the Parisian hotels are Grand), the window of which commanded a superb view of the great city, the vaudeville playhouse of the world. Pour la premi�re fois the dazzle and glitter had burst upon us, confusing first, but now assuming form and coherence. If we and incomprehensible at could have had each a dozen eyes instead of two, or less greed to see and more patience to learn! Day by day we had put off the inevitable evil of finding a studio. Every night found us in the cheapest seats of some theatre, and often we lolled on the terraces of the CafŽ de la Paix, watching the pretty girls as they passed, their silken skirts saucily pulled up, revealing dainty laces and ankles. From the slippery floor of the Louvre galleries we had studied the masterpieces of David, Rubens, Rembrandt, and the rest; had visited the PanthŽon, the MusŽe Cluny; had climbed the Eiffel Tower, and traversed the Bois de Boulogne and the Champs-ElysŽes. Then came the search for a studio and the settling to work. It would be famous to have a little home of our very own, where we could have little dinners of our very own cooking! It is with a shudder that I recall those eleven days of ceaseless studio-hunting. We dragged ourselves through miles of Quartier Latin streets, and up hundreds of flights of polished waxed stairs, behind puffing concierges in carpet slippers, the puffing changing to grumbling, as, dissatisfied, the concierges followed us down the stairs. The Quartier abounds with placards reading, "Atelier d'Artiste ˆ Louer!" The rentals ranged from two hundred to two thousand francs a year, and the sizes from cigar-boxes to barns. But there was always something lacking. On the eleventh day we found a suitable place on the sixth (top) floor of a quaint old house in a passage off the Rue St.- AndrŽ-des-Arts. There were overhead and side lights, and from the window a noble view of Paris over the house-tops.