I am in transit from Paris to my new home in Essex. I feel that I have often been in transit and feel ready to settle. I hope this next move will prove to be, if not permanent, at least lengthy.
When from here in London I look back at Paris,. I always see the streets which lie on the steep slope between the Rue de Chateaudun and the exterior boulevard where Montmartre begins. Streets such as the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, the Rue des Martyrs, the Rue Fontaine and the Rue d'Aumale, one of the most truly Parisian streets in Paris. Though I have lived in various quarters of Paris, on both banks of the Seine, it is to these streets that my memory ever returns. And though I have lived for many years in London, no London street makes the same friendly and intimate appeal to me as these simple middle-class streets of little shops and flats over the shops, with little restaurants and cafes, and little theatres here and there at the corner.The morning life of these streets delighted me, with the hatless women and girls shopping, and the tradesmen - and, above all, the tradeswomen - polite and firm at their counters, and the vast omnibuses scrambling up or thundering down, and the placid customers in the little cafes. The waiters in the restaurants and cafes were human; they are inhuman in London. The concierges of both sexes were fiends, but they were human fiends. There was everywhere a strange mixture of French industry (which is tremendous) and French nonchalance (which is charmingly awful). Virtue and wickedness were equally apparent and equally candid. Hypocrisy alone was absent. I could find more intellectual honesty within a mile of the Rue d'Aumale than in the whole of England. And more than anything whatever I prize intellectual honesty.
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