"Regardez-moi"

The face of Paris, so ageless and radiant in the years of freedom, is that of a gnarled and brooding old lady under the Nazis. The city was in no mood for a facelifting last week, but it had started to get one. The Germans were tearing down buildings in St. Germain des Pres, St. Gervais, Le Marais, the Palais Royal and the Halles (central markets). Except St. Germain, all these quarters belong to the old inner Paris, walled and fortified at the end of the 12th Century by Philippe Auguste, the powerful king who conquered Normandy and pushed his authority past feudal nobles to all the frontiers of his realm. The first church of St. Germain was built in the meadows by Childebert I in the 6th Century, when Paris was a Roman island in the river. In the Palais Royal the great Cardinal Richelieu died and Louis XIV shone like the sun. Across the river Margaret of Burgundy met the lovers whom she was said to have silenced by drowning.

For Parisians the dream of history is caught in the web of streets where the Nazis last week stolidly laid waste--in preparation, it was said, for a rebuilding job designed by no less an architect than Adolf Hitler. A brave letter appeared in Figaro: "Paris, which in June of 1940 miraculously escaped trial by fire and the horror of destruction, is unexpectedly menaced by new destruction." The letter was signed by a group of intellectuals and painters, including Jean Giraudoux, Paul Valery, Paul Morand, Jean Cocteau, Andre Derain. The man in the street, passing the wreckers at work, simply muttered: "Regardez-moi ces assassins," and looked, as he seldom looked in the years of freedom, at the soaring crags of the Eiffel Tower, which the Nazis had threatened to tear down for the sake of its steel.

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