One Man's Paris

SPRINGTIME IN PARIS (364 pp.)--Elliot Paul--Random House ($3.50).

France may have changed in ten years but not the French. Not, at least, in the Rue de la Huchette, a short, crowded Left Bank street that runs parallel to the Seine. Peripatetic Novelist Elliot Paul ought to know. He lived there, off & on, for 18 years before the war, came back to the U.S. and wrote his bestselling The Last Time I Saw Paris (TIME, April 27, 1942).

Returning to Paris last spring, Paul made a beeline for the Rue de la Huchette, like a man taking up again with an old but still tantalizing mistress. He sat down immediately to write another book about his shabby but still high-pitched and mercurial street. It hadn't changed much and neither has Paul's way of writing about it.

Slow Down the Baggage. Springtime in Paris is a glib, sentimental report which tells a lot more than its uncompromisingly Francophile author intended. Just as The Last Time unwittingly exposed some of the political and social degeneracy that helped France to her downfall, so Springtime airily touches on contemporary blotches of decay that might be just as deadly.

Even his beloved Rue de la Huchette, Paul found, has its quota of Communists. In a crisis, they and their fellows would be more dangerous--because more dedicated--than the collaborators of World War II. Through the labor unions, they controlled the daily life of Paris, made their power felt in ways that ranged from anti-U.S. propaganda to slowdowns in delivering baggage to priests. When the clerks at the Paris stock exchange went on strike, says Paul, the Communist-influenced sanitation department massed loaded garbage trucks near the Bourse building to help bring the brokers to terms.

Butcher to the Stand. Paul found many of his old friends still around, most of them still fiercely individualistic and stubbornly provincial. The prostitutes, officially outlawed, were still in business. Monsieur Monge, the horse butcher, was at his old stand and doing better than ever. Young Dr. Thiouville, a Communist, was new, but Paul decided that he was a fine fellow because his leftishness did not get between him and the Hippocratic oath. Love was going on as usual, with all its old Gallic casualness; so was French inefficiency (wretched telephone service, exasperating loafing on the job). Paul decided it was all just as endearing as ever.

There is little doubt that Author Paul loves the Rue de la Huchette, its food, its people and its liveliness. His weakness as a reporter of it is not so much his frank bias as his congenital tendency to smother his account in cuteness. Springtime is Paris seen through the bottom of a wineglass.

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