A German clothing store in one of the little German towns across the Swiss borderline would open for the day with a store full of goods priced in marks at prices comparable to the wages the Germans in the town were making. A couple of Swiss who had saved two or three weeks’ wages in francs and bought all the marks they could carry would enter the store and buy out its entire contents. Then they would drive their wagonload of clothing back a mile or so to the Swiss border to enter their native land and start a clothing store of their own, with prices marked down to half what their own Swiss competitors charged.
These exchange pirates were ruining the market for Swiss products and the Germans in the border villages could get no clothing at all; it was all going to Switzerland. So the governments of both countries passed the present strict customs laws.
Of course there is still a big traffic in smuggled goods but it is nothing like the great days when the Swiss could buy out a clothing store and drive triumphantly home with it for the same expenditure that they would make for a pair of shoes in their own country.
Paris is Full of Russians
The Toronto Daily Star
February 25, 1922
PARIS.—Paris is full of Russians at present. The Russian ex-aristocracy are scattered all over Europe, running restaurants in Rome, tearooms on Capri, working as hotel porters in Nice and Marseilles and as laborers along the Mediterranean shipping centers. But those Russians who managed to bring some money or possessions with them seem to have flocked to Paris.
They are drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right, which is quite charming when you first encounter it and rather maddening after a few months. No one knows just how they live except it is by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that they brought with them to France when they fled before the revolution.
According to the manager of a great jewel house on the Rue de la Paix, pearls have come down in price because of the large numbers of beautiful pearls that have been sold to Parisian jewel buyers by the Russian refugees. It is true that many Russians are living fairly lavishly in Paris at present on the sale of jewels they have brought with them in their exile.
Just what the Russian colony in Paris will do when all the jewels are sold and all the valuables pawned is somewhat of a question. It is usually impossible for a large body of people to support themselves indefinitely by borrowing money, although a few people enjoy a great success at it for a time. Of course things may change in Russia, something wonderful might happen to aid the Russian colony. There is a café on the Boulevard Montparnasse where a great number of Russians gather every day for this something wonderful to happen and to recall the great old days of the Czar. But there is a great probability that nothing very wonderful nor unexpected will happen and then, eventually, like all the rest of the world, the Russians of Paris may have to go to work. It seems a pity, they are such a charming lot.
Papal Poll: Behind the Scenes
The Toronto Star Weekly
March 4, 1922
PARIS.—Once a week Anglo-American newspaper correspondents resident in Paris meet to talk shop. If the world could have a Dictaphone in the room it would have such a backstage view of European politicians, conferences, coronations and world affairs that it would spin very fast for quite a time from the shock.
All week the correspondents have been mailing or cabling dispatches giving the news as they saw it as trained professional observers. For a couple of hours each Wednesday they talk it over as they saw it as human beings watching human beings instead of newspapermen with diplomas.
“They crowned the pope on a plain pine board throne, put together just for that,” says one of the men who has spent twenty-one days in Rome covering the death of the pope [Benedict IV] and the coronation of the new pontiff [Pius XI] for one of the big wire-services.
“It reminded me of a fraternity initiation when I saw the throne and watched them getting the scenery out the day before.”
“Afterwards Johnson and I” (the name isn’t Johnson, but that of a correspondent of one of the great press syndicates) “were talking with Cardinal Gasparri about why they didn’t wait for the American cardinals. Johnson was asking him why they hadn’t waited.
“‘We do things very quickly here,’ Gasparri said to Johnson.
“‘Perhaps you do them a little too quickly for Americans and Canadians, your eminence,’ Johnson said to him.
“‘We have to be careful about you newspapermen,’ the cardinal said to Johnson.
“‘Perhaps you wouldn’t have to be if you took us more into your confidence, your eminence,” Johnson answered.
“‘Who is that funny little fat man?’ Gasparri asked one of his attendants.
“‘You have a lot of nerve to call me fat, your eminence,’ Johnson said.”
The dialogue between the Vatican and the press did not appear in any of the news dispatches. Neither did the news dispatches tell of the difficulties the correspondents had to get their news out of Rome.
All cables were sent from the post office, where there were three rooms for newspapermen. In one of those rooms one typewriter was permitted to be used. More than one typewriter was supposed to make too much noise for the Italian correspondents to be able to think. When the Americans and Britons unlimbered Coronas there was a fearful row.
Half the people in the telegraph office were betting on the result of the balloting for the new head of the church, and when an American correspondent would tear through the crowd from the phone to write on a cable blank, he would be hemmed in by excited shouters demanding in German, French and Italian to know his news.
A papal censorship had been established and all cables containing the names of certain cardinals were automatically held up at the sending office. In the end this censorship protected some correspondents who had learned from “absolutely reliable sources” of the election of a certain cardinal who did not become the new pope, and sent cables announcing his election.
Rome was jammed for the coronation of the pope but there were only about fifty newspapermen. This is accounted for by the speed with which the election of a new pope follows the death of the old; there is not time to get men over from abroad to cover the event. Prices were sky high and double and treble rates in force for Americans.
“I found the way to get through the crowds though,” an American correspondent said. “The only people in Italy who wear silk hats are diplomats and so I bought a top hat, and whenever I wanted to get through anywhere I put it on, and it worked like a charm.”
By dint of top hats, bribes, shoving, proxies, and Italians to translate the Italian newspapers, the correspondents got the news, and sometimes got it on the wire. To read the even paragraphs in the news dispatches, you would have no idea under what conditions they were written.
Try Bobsledding if You Want Thrills
The Toronto Daily Star
March 4, 1922
LES AVANTS, SWITZERLAND.—If you want a thrill of the sort that starts at the base of your spine in a shiver and ends with your nearly swallowing your heart, as it leaps with a jump into your mouth, try bobsledding on a mountain road at fifty miles an hour.
The bob holds two persons. There is a steering wheel about twice as big as a doughnut for the victim in front to hang on to and two steel brakes that jam into the road on either side of the rear of the sled to make arm holds for the victims in the rear. You sit down, someone shoves you, and the road starts slipping about six inches below where you are sitting. On a steep slope of icy road it takes a bobsled just about as long to get started into high as it does a gun to shoot after you pull the trigger.
You hang on to the wheel, watch the road and a mountain unreels alongside of you like a movie film. The bob is rushing along with a steely lisp from the runners and a rising dive like the galloping horse when you hit the uneven places in the road. It is picking up speed and you make a turn and the road drops down an even steeper shoo
t of road and the bob roars down over the ice. There is a great snowy valley on the left with huge saw-toothed bulks of mountains on the other side, but you only get rushing glimpses of it out of the corner of your eye as the bob shrieks around a turn.
You feel it is all you can do to hold the sled on to the road when the road swoops into a forest and you roar through it on the iciness of the road that is as hard as the way of the transgressor. Just then you hear a shout of “Garde” behind you and the braker looks around and sees through the trees a big eight-passenger bob just dropping down the slope into the forest stretch of the road. Everyone in the big bob screams at you and you pull over to the right of the road to let them pass. But the road is icier there and you pick up more speed while they are slowed by the newer snow at the left and fall back of you again. You go down the next slope abreast with the bob runners making a whispering rush on the ice and then at a wide turn they pass you with a roar and a slither of ice from the brakes.
The road is not so steep here and you slow to about twenty miles an hour and steer with one hand, wipe the wind tears out of your eyes and look back at the sunset that is turning the white shoulders of the mountain pink. It is just a glimpse, for the road dips into another stretch of timber and you roar down the last steep slope to the railway station. There are a crowd of people in snow clothes and four or five bobs waiting for the train to take them up the mountain and you stamp your feet warm and brush the snow and ice thrown up by the brakes from each other’s backs. While you wait for the train, you munch at ham sandwiches that a little boy peddles from a basket to the bobsledders, watch the sun go down over the great sweep of snow-covered country and wonder why people go to Palm Beach or the Riviera in the wintertime.
The Hotels in Switzerland
The Toronto Star Weekly
March 4, 1922
LES AVANTS, SWITZERLAND.—Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up-and-down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo-clock style of architecture. Every place that the land goes sufficiently sideways a hotel is planted, and all the hotels look as though they had been cut out by the same man with the same scroll saw.
You walk along a wild-looking road through a sweep of dark forest that spreads over the side of a mountain. There are deer tracks in the snow and a big raven teeters back and forth on the high branch of a pine tree, watching you examine the tracks. Down below there is a snow-softened valley that climbs into white, jagged peaks with more splashes of pine forest on their peaks. It is as wild as the Canadian Rockies. Then you round a bend in the road and see four monstrous hotels looking like mammoth children’s playhouses of the iron-dog-on-the-front-lawn period of Canadian architecture squatting on the side of the mountain. It does something to you.
The fashionable hotels of Switzerland are scattered over the country, like billboards along the right of way of a railroad and in winter are filled with the utterly charming young men, with rolling white sweaters and smoothly brushed hair, who make a living playing bridge. These young men do not play bridge with each other, not in working hours at least. They are usually playing with women who are old enough to be their mothers and who deal with a flashing of platinum rings on plump fingers. I do not know just how it all is worked, but the young men look quite contented and the women can evidently afford to lose.
Then there are the French aristocracy. These are not the splendid aristocracy of toothless old women and white-mustached old men that are making a final stand in the Faubourg St. Honoré in Paris against ever-increasing prices. The French aristocracy that comes to Switzerland consists of very young men who wear very old names and very-tight-in-the-knees riding breeches with equal grace. They are the few that have the great names of France who, through some holdings or other in iron or coal, were enriched by the war and are able to stop at the same hotels with the men who sold blankets and wine to the army. When the young men with the old names come into a room full of profiteers, sitting with their pre-money wives and post-money daughters, it is like seeing a slim wolf walk into a pen of fat sheep. It seems to puncture the value of the profiteers’ titles. No matter what their nationality, they have a heavy, ill-at-ease look.
Besides the bridge men who were the dancing men and will be again, and the old and the new aristocracy, the big hotels house ruddy English families who are out all day on the ski slopes and bobsled runs; pale-faced men who are living in the hotel because they know when they leave it they will be a long time in the sanitarium, elderly women who fill a loneliness with the movement of the hotel life, and a good sprinkling of Americans and Canadians who are traveling for pleasure.
The Swiss make no difference between Canadians and citizens of the United States. I wondered about this, and asked a hotel-keeper if he didn’t notice any difference between the people from the two countries.
“Monsieur,” he said, “Canadians speak English and always stay two days longer at any place than Americans do.” So there you are.
Hotelkeepers, they say, are very wise. But all the Americans I have seen so far were very busy learning to talk English. Harvard was founded for that purpose, it is sometimes rumored, so if the people from the States ever slow up, the hotelkeepers may have to find some new tests.
Wives Buy Clothes for French Husbands
The Toronto Star Weekly
March 11, 1922
PARIS.—At last the balloon-shaped, narrow-at-the-bottom trousers of the French workman are explained. People have wondered for years why the French workingman wanted to get himself up in the great billowy trousers that were so tight at the cuffs as to hardly be able to pull over his feet. Now it is out. He doesn’t. His wife buys them for him.
Recently at the noon hour in French factories there has been a great trading of clothing by the men. They exchange coats, trousers, hats and shoes. It is a revolt against feminism. For the wife of a French workingman from time immemorial has bought all her husband’s clothes, and now the Frenchman is beginning to protest against it.
Two Frenchmen who served in the same regiment together and had not seen each other since the demobilization aired their grievances in a bus the other day when they met.
“Your hair, Henri!” said one.
“My wife, old one, she cuts it. But your hair, also? It is not too chic!”
“My wife too. She cuts it also. She says barbers are dirty pigs, but at the finish I must give her the same tip as I would give the barber.”
“Ah the hair is a small matter. Regard these shoes.”
“My poor old friend! Such shoes. It is incredible.”
“It is my wife’s system. She goes into the shop and says, ‘I want a pair of shoes for mon mari. Not expensive. Mon mari’s feet are this much longer than mine, I believe, and about this much wider. That will do nicely. Wrap them up.’ Old one, it is terrible!”
“But me also. I am clothed in bargains. What matter if they do not fit? They are bon marché. Still she is a wonderful cook. She is a cook beyond comparison. My old one, it would take one of your understanding to appreciate what a treasure among cooks she is.”
“Mine also. A cook beyond all price. A jewel of the first water of cooks. What do clothes matter after all?”
“It is true. Truly it is true! They are a small matter.”
So in spite of the trading which has been going on in the factories and sporadic outbreaks of protest, the reign of feminism will probably continue.
Tip the Postman Every Time?
The Toronto Star Weekly
March 11, 1922
PARIS.—Tipping the postman is the only way to insure the arrival of your letters in certain parts of Spain.
The postman comes in sight down the street waving a letter. “A letter for the Señor,” he shouts. He hands it to you.
“A splendid letter, is it not, Señor? I, the postman, brought it to you. Surely the good postman will be well rewarded for the delivery of such a splendid letter?”
You tip the postman. It
is a little more than he had expected. He is quite overcome.
“Señor,” says the postman, “I am an honest man. Your generosity has touched my heart. Here is another letter. I had intended to save it for tomorrow to insure another reward from the always generous Señor. But here it is. Let us hope it will be as splendid a letter as the first!”
The postman bows and departs. If you have been in Spain long enough you are able to hang on to your temper. It is the climate that does it, they say. The climate is so soft and gentle that it makes it seem not worthwhile to kill the postman. Life is mellow in Spain.
The conversation above actually occurred, and was brought back to Paris intact by an American who has been painting down in Majorca. All the American magazines that were sent to him had illustrations cut out. They were excised to brighten the walls of the local post office.
When the artist asked the postman about the magazines, he answered, “We have so little to read. It is such a dull town. Surely the Señor who has so much would not grudge us the mere pictures from his reviews?”
“And do you know,” the artist said, “after a while I got so that it didn’t bother me a bit. It’s funny the way things get you down here.”
It must certainly be the climate.
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