The Art of Sitting Down

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

‘I THINK I know how to sit down to look at life.’ Thus Pierre de Coulevain in the introduction to her Sur la Branche. It is a sentence thoroughly French, in its matter and in its origin. She has adapted it, she tells us, from Corot. If you wish to realize, he said, to understand, ‘to seize,’the soul of a landscape, you must, ‘savoir s’asseoir’ know how to sit down. Life is not written so that he who runs may read. Ruskin expresses the same idea in Prœterita, where he speaks of that ‘patience in looking, and precision in feeling, which afterwards, with due industry, formed my analytical power.’ As a child, he often passed days contentedly ‘in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of [the] carpet; — examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses.’ The art of sitting down may be practised, you see, in England, or even in the United States; but Americans who wish to become truly proficient will find Paris the ideal place to study.

There are, for instance, the cabdrivers. I think especially of a certain stand at the corner of the rue Babylone. (Is there, I wonder, a significance in the name? By the waters of Babylon, you remember, the prophet sat down.) When we moved to the apartment — it was always known as the apartment, as if there were no others in the city worth mentioning — we marked that cab-stand, its drooping horses slanting into dingy nose-bags, and thought how convenient it would be on mornings when we were late in starting for the office. Less than a week had elapsed, when a sunny June day saw us, Louise having been dilatory with the eau chaud, panting round the corner full twenty minutes behind our time. Under the plane trees on the boulevard stood one solitary man guarding six slanting horses. Breathless, we asked for a carriage. Very good. But we wanted it at once. Impossible; the cochers were at breakfast. A wave of the hand indicated a tree-shaded buvette on the other side of the road. All of them at breakfast? Why, of course, all of them. Politely mild surprise was indicated in the lift of the eyebrows at our implication that one might breakfast alone when good company was to be had. When would they have finished? Oh, in twenty minutes, perhaps. We walked, but we did not hurry; we were beginning to learn.

The French know how to sit down at their work as well as at their meals. There is a printer’s on the rue St.Honoré where I used to go to read proof on Red Cross bulletins. Instead of the elevator to the twelfth story by which you reach your press in New York, you step into the shadow of an archway, where a tiny crowd is gathered about a dark-eyed girl singing to the accompaniment of a wailing violin. You cross a little stone-paved court, stumble down two worn old steps, and stoop suddenly through a dingy door into the shop. A counter, a desk, a dusty light, and a tall, immaculate Englishman in a high wing-collar. He is the proprietor. Fifteen years a printer in Paris, he wears that fatalistic, slightly bewildered look of the AngloSaxon who has tried to hurry the East. He has learned at last to sit down, but he still does it under protest.

His partner is a thin elderly Frenchman, with an abortive Van Dyck beard and a beautiful sad courtesy. The head of the composing-room — printer’s ink is a better obliterater of nationality than any melting-pot — is a thick, square Hindu, who speaks his English with a cockney accent though he learned his trade in Seattle. His domain is separated from the office only by a swinging door, but since there are no linotype machines, and most of the presses are worked by hand, this is rather a convenience than otherwise. The typesetters are all French, — most of them have wooden legs or walk on crutches, — and though they follow English copy surprisingly well, they hyphenate in the convenient French manner, simply stopping a word with whatever letter chances to come at the end of the line. It necessitates some rather drastic proof-reading; the whole system is not quite what one would call expeditious; but, after all, what is the use of expedition?

I came in to read proof about five o’clock one dark afternoon, and found the French partner working at his desk, while, in the corner, his stenographer made tea on a little alcohol stove. Monsieur C— insisted, despite my protests, that I occupy his desk and chair while he continued his writing at the counter. Then, while I displaced hyphens and corrected strange misspellings, the little stenographer placed at my elbow a rose-patterned china cup and a petit pain spread with marmalade. It was late in the day, we were all three working hard, but the fragrant steam shed about us an aroma of leisure and of calm. Proof-reading became, not a drive against time, but a dignified and charming occupation. My mind swung back to a night in a New York press, some months before, when, dinnerless at nine-thirty, I had stood reading wet proof-sheets as if the future of the country hung on my having them O.K.’d by ten o’clock.

The most commonplace things of life become beautiful when you sit down to look at them. Lunch, for instance — how exquisite and graceful a thing when two hours are dedicated to its consumption instead of fifteen minutes! How pleasant is a daily paper with time for philosophy and literature on its front page! And the very names of things! The French do not baptize their streets, for instance, with regard to the length of time it will take to spell the name over the telephone or to write it on an envelope. The Street of Our Lady of the Fields, the Street of the Market of St.-Honoré, the Street of the Halberd, the Street of the Dancing Goat, the Street of the Jumping Dog, the Street of the Trapped Cats. Here is prayer, and humor, and romance, and history. You cannot hurry down those streets; you must stroll along them slowly, swinging your cane, looking at life and savoring it. There is a street in Orléans which could have been named only by a people who, through generations, have looked at life slowly and steadily, and seen it whole. La rue des Pensées, the Street of Thoughts; it is perhaps the perfect symbol of the art of sitting down.