"Saint-Roch," I answered.
"Saint-Roch! Saint-Roch! Saint-Roch!" he cried in crescendo. "Of course, OF COURSE, because this is the Rue Saint-Honoré. The Rue Saint-Honoré!" Beside himself with excitement, he rushed across the street, and up on the steps. I followed, mystified. My friend was waving his cane when I reached his side. "It was here," he announced, as if he had made a wonderful discovery, "right on this spot."
"In Heaven's name what?" I queried.
"The beginning of the most glorious epoch of French history, the birth of the Napoleonic era."
And then he told me the story of how young Bonaparte, called upon to prevent a mob from rushing the Tuileries, put his guns on the steps of Saint-Roch, swept the street in both directions, and demonstrated that he was the first man since '89 who could dominate a Parisian crowd. "You wouldn't have thought there was anything interesting about this old church, would you?" he ended triumphantly.
My eyes filled with tears, and my lips trembled. It was his turn to be mystified, and mine to lead. I took him inside the church, and back to the chapel of Saint Joseph. "Here," I said, "on Christmas Eve I came with my father when I was five years old. It was the first time I remember seeing the Nativity pictured. Good old Joseph looked down on the interior of the inn. The three wise men were there with the gifts. Le petit Jésus was in a real cradle, and I counted the jewels around the Mother's neck. My father tried to explain to me what Christmas means. He died when I was a little girl. I brought my firstborn here on Christmas Eve and the others as they came along. I never knew about Napoleon's connection with Saint-Roch before. And you asked me whether I would have thought there was anything interesting about this old church!"
The same place can mean so many different things to so many different people. Paris was Babylon to my grandfather who never went there. And to those who go there Paris gives what they seek, historical reminiscences, esthetic pleasure, intellectual profit, inspiration to paint or sing or play, a surfeit of the mundane, a diminution or an increase of the sense of nationality, pretty clothes and hats and perfumes, "rattling" good food and drink or a "howling" good time. You can be bored in Paris just as quickly and as completely as in any other place in the world. You can fill your life full of interesting and engrossing pursuits more quickly and completely than in any other place in the world. Best of all you make your home in Paris, with no sense of exile, and enjoy what Paris alone offers in material and spiritual values without being abnormal or living abnormally.
My childhood vistas seem fragmentary when I put them down on paper. But they have meant so much to me that I could choose for my children no greater blessing than to know Paris as home at the beginning of their lives.