From the Introduction. YESTERDAY there was a familiar and much hackneyed saying to the effect that all good Americans go to Paris when they die. To-day it does not come so readily to the lips. Somehow, about it, there is a flippant, even a jarring, note. Yesterday, for most of us, the city by the Seine stood for the lightness and the gaiety of life, for the glitter of spacious boulevards, for the splendour of open spaces, for the beauty of monuments. The "pleasant land of France" as a whole meant the plages of Trouville ...
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From the Introduction. YESTERDAY there was a familiar and much hackneyed saying to the effect that all good Americans go to Paris when they die. To-day it does not come so readily to the lips. Somehow, about it, there is a flippant, even a jarring, note. Yesterday, for most of us, the city by the Seine stood for the lightness and the gaiety of life, for the glitter of spacious boulevards, for the splendour of open spaces, for the beauty of monuments. The "pleasant land of France" as a whole meant the plages of Trouville or Deauville, quaint fishing villages of Brittany, largely populated by aspiring painters in striking raiment who spoke French with a delicious, mid-western nasal twang, the ch???teaux of Touraine, the rich vineyards of the C???te d'Or , symbol of the "imprisoned laughter of the peasant girls of France," the semi-tropical warmth of the Riviera. It is to a different Paris, and a France which Paris represents, but which must never be wholly judged by Paris, that the eyes of millions of Americans are turned to-day. Above all, it is the stones of France that, to our countrymen and countrywomen, are taking on a new meaning. We understand better now the stately Pantheon that crowns the Mont de Paris. Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante . No longer will the great cemetaries of Montmartre and of P???re Lachaise be merely spectacles. Too close to our hearts are thousands of simple mounds, that, peasant tended, stretch from the Flemish lowlands to the Vosges mountains, along the line where the Wall of Steel held. With newly awakened eyes we are beholding France's mighty past. The centuries that are gone now have their significance. Yesterday Reims was a city unknown in the United States save to the travelled few. To-day, there is hardly a village between the Atlantic and the Pacific that does not thrill to the name....
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