The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

The city affected him almost to breathlessness as it opened before him when he passed the ancient grayness of the Louvre. He turned to the left and stood between the wide jaws of the Louvre, the mouth of the Place du Carrousel, and, standing there, looked westward through the reaches of the Tuileries and beyond to where, silhouetted with massive grandeur, uprose Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe.... It was impossible—incredibly magnificent. At that instant began the first great change in his life. He might not consciously have dated it from that instant, and possibly he never dated it at all, but Paris had set the hand of her beauty upon him; her spell had touched him with its magic.

“Why,” he said to himself, “anything could happen here!” And presently, “The Germans drop bombs on this ... they try to destroy this.”

For the first time came an appreciation, not yet a full appreciation, but far more than an inkling, that a great event had overtaken him: he had left the Middle West behind him; he felt that he was not only about to see, but to be a part of, a new and wonderful mode of life and of thought. There came to him a hint that there might be something to life besides merely living it. Though he did not know the phrase, he felt something of the meaning it bears—Joie de vivre. Later he would, perhaps, appreciate a remark made to him by a French officer. “It is not savoir faire that is the great knowledge, it is savoir vivre.” It is not so important to know how to conduct oneself as it is to know how to make the most of life....

He retraced his steps to the rue de Rivoli, stopped to regard the golden Jeanne d’Arc about which he said to himself that he would have liked it better if it had been bronze or marble, and that the sculptor had made Jeanne “huskier” than he had pictured her to himself. That was the word he used—“huskier.” Somehow he had always conceived Jeanne d’Arc—what slight conception he had of her—as rather anemic and thin and fragile.... His conception of Jeanne was like the conception many good Americans have made for themselves of France. Two millions of them would soon be on French soil to see for themselves that it was not an anemic, fragile country, but robust, healthy, capable not only of visions, but of battles....

He walked on to pause again in the Place de la Concorde and to marvel at such prodigality of open space in the very heart of a great city. He even tried to calculate to himself the money worth of so many acres in the retail section of New York, say along Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street north and west.... It was a typical American calculation. Beyond him the Champs Élysées reached on, climbing its little gradient to the Arc dc Triomphe. It was splendid and beautiful. It “got under his skin,” as he phrased it.

He stood there looking off across the river toward the Chamber of Deputies, over the roof of which could be seen the dome of Napoleon’s Tomb. Then he turned and surveyed the path he had just traversed, that reach of low, symmetrical buildings facing the Jardin des Tuileries. He was not exactly inarticulate, but he was not eloquent. “I’ll be damned,” he said under his breath. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Now he was hungry, and, walking more rapidly, he returned to the University Union to find the dining-room open and a few American officers at petit déjeuner. For the most part they were eating bread and confiture and washing it down with chocolate. A few were taking the American breakfast, actually eating two eggs and other food—a thing to convince the Parisian that these visitors were indeed mad, or at least barbarians.

“Yea, boy!” said a loud voice, just as Captain Ware was endeavoring to give his order to one of the two pretty French girls who were the waitresses. It was his first sight of the Parisienne, and it had rather surprised him. They did not wear short skirts and high-heeled slippers, with more than enough black-stockinged ankle to regard. They had not saucy eyes and rétroussé noses, nor did they whisk about flirtatiously. They were pretty, indeed they were charming, but they were quiet, even subdued, and they looked nice. That was a good American word he could apply to them. He liked their looks, even if they failed to come up to his ideas of what a French waitress should be.

He looked up from the pad on which he had been checking off the petit déjeuner, to see facing him across the table, in a captain’s uniform and Sam Brown belt which made him almost unrecognizable, a man with whom he had been more than friendly through four years in Ann Arbor.

“Bert Stanley!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet and extending his hand.