Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

Iron Shutters and Open Lawns The sealed windows and iron shutters of France are the citizen's contribution to the perpetuation of French liberty By Henry Altimus o XE o\ the first impulses of an American on entering a French home is to throw open a window, thereby at once establishing himself in the eyes of his hosts as a citizen of a country where liberty is non-existent. Unwittingly, the American thus avows that he is not a freeman but a -lave. One of the first conclusions of an American on seeing the heavy iron shutters that almost hermetically seal Paris shops over-night and over the week-end is that the French are a mean, suspicious, distrustful race ; and he at once begins boasting of his own country, with its acres of unprotected plate-glass windows and its miles of open, fenceless and often even hedgeless lawns. Xow bragging, a perfectly healthy, normal impulse, is in disrepute merely because the braggart nearly always boasts about the wrong thing, just as the chief fault with criticism is that it nearly always carps at the wrong thing. "When the American abroad boasts of open windows and open lawns, he is not aware that he is praising his shackles as tho they were ornaments ; and when he criticizes the sealed windows and iron shutters of France, he does not realize that he is attacking the most eloquent symbols of French liberty. For some reason or other, Americans mistakenly believe that the French keep their windows shut in order to exclude fresh air and that the iron shutters behind which Paris shops withdraw at night, are designed to exclude thieves. The sealed windows and iron shutters of France are the national monu ments to French liberty. They are the citizen's contribution to the perpetuation of that liberty. When an American throws open a window in his own home, he ma} do so with the perfect assurance that only fresh air will enter, and he may step up to the window and tranquilly look out upon a tranqui world : a world made orderly by police regulations, made silent by anti-noise associations, made inoffensive by antivice societies. When a Frenchman throws open a window in his home, he does so with fear and trepidation, for he knows that he exposes himself not merely to a rush of fresh air but to the invasion of the countless manifestations of individual liberty: the right to make as much noise as one likes, the absence of traffic regulations and the resultant pandemonium, the lack of speed limit, the freedom to court lover or mistress on the curb as ardently as tho one were shielded by the privacy of a boudoir, the right to live one's life as one pleases. The first American who threw open his window' became the founder of the first society to suppress something. The Frenchman shuts his window, preferring asphyxiation to restraint. The iron shutters of France are an assurance that individual liberty must have no limits, that the shop-owner will protect himself, but will impose no obstacles. The wide, untrammeled lawns of the typical American estate are an assurance that the country is so thoroly policed, restraint so effective, the individual so neatly trimmed by preventive legislation to the accepted pattern of virtue, that any deviation from the pattern, any unseemly outburst of individuality, is a remote possibility. The French build high stone walls about their estates, sacrificing the lovely view so that the world beyond may live as it likes. The failure of Americans in France to understand this and to adjust themselves to a degree of individual liberty to which they are unaccustomed is the source of considerable amusement to the French — and not seldom of considerable annoyance. For the American abroad cannot ignore his missionary instinct to drag the heathen foreigner down to his own heaven. Recently the daughter of an American millionaire flounced indignantly out of a Montmartre cabaret and rushed to the nearest police station to lodge a complaint, declaring that it was an outrage that such a place should be allowed to remain open. The officer in charge politely informed her that he would attend the performance in person the next day. The modesty of the heiress having made it impossible for her to lodge a specific complaint, the officer was somewhat puzzled after witnessing a typical, amusing and orthodoxly nude Montmartre performance. The audience was enjoying itself hugely, which to him was the supreme test, and he was at a loss until he happened to scan the price list. The next day the heiress was informed that her complaint was a thoroly just one, : A. that the prices charged for drinks at the cabaret were outrageously high, j and that the proprietor had been ordered to cut them almost in half. To the naive French officer of the law it was inconceivable that the heiress was objecting on moral and not on economic grounds and that she could wish to suppress the pleasure of a thousand people in order to satisfy her prudery. He did not realize that the American girl was acting on a principle widely accepted in her country : that it is simpler to invoke the law than to shut one's window. I was in the Gare de Lyon one evening, waiting in line for my ticket, when I saw a youth clash thru the gateway from an arriving train, cleave a path thru the crowds, and bolt for the street. Behind him was (Continued on page 71) Page Forty-One