So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris is an enchanted city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance to get behind the scenes of life in Paris, and to put romance to the test of reality.
One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I went there for a fortnight with my wife, in the first year of our marriage, on savings from my majestic income of £120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel called the Hôtel du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch--where Napoleon fired his “whiff of grapeshot”--and explored the city and all its museums with untiring delight, although at that time, during the Dreyfus trial and the Fashoda crisis, England was so unpopular that we--obviously English--were actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the Entente Cordiale!)
One little show was unusual in its character. A fool named Jules Guérin, wanted by the police for not paying his rates, or something of the kind, fortified his house in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole armed might of Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and fired at any policeman who approached. M. Lépine, the prefect, decided to besiege him and starve him out, and when my wife and I wedged our way through vast crowds, we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army of gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to the great annoyance of my wife, who desired to see Jules Guérin.
While we were talking together, a woman plucked my wife’s sleeve and said in French, “You want to see Guérin?... Come with me.”
She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond the police cordon until, suddenly, we came into the very center of the deserted street.
“Voilà!” said the woman. “Vous voyez l’imbécile!”
She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure enough, was the “imbecile,” Guérin, a sinister-looking fellow with a black beard, with a large revolver very much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he looked very much annoyed.... It was a full week before he surrendered to the law.
One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was when the Confédération Générale de Travail, under the leadership of Jean Jaurès, declared a general strike against the government of Aristide Briand. It was a trial of strength between those two men, who had once been comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. Both of them were men of outstanding character. Jaurès was much more than a hot-headed demagogue, of the new Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization in revenge against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in every fiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian qualities, including kindness and charity and personal morality, in spite of religious scepticism. He saw with clear vision the approaching danger of war with Germany, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf of antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could be won over to international peace, if French democracy would link up with them. It was for that reason that he attacked the three years’ system of military service, and denounced the increasing expenditure of France on military preparations. But to attain his ideal of international peace, he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, and defended many of its violent methods, including “direct action.” It was with Aristide Briand that he had drawn up the plans of a general strike in which every trade union or syndicate in France would join at the appointed hour, in order to demonstrate the power of “Labor” and to overthrow the autocracy of “Capital.”