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National Geographic : 1936 Oct
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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams A CHANGE IN STYLES HITS THE PETIT GUIGNOL Contrary to popular opinion, the Parisian puppet show is not confined to Punch and Judy. There are scores of parts and dozens of plots, many of them as familiar as fairy tales to young visitors to the Tuileries Gardens. Pere Guignol here shows a harridan of the old school a new type of wooden-headed actress for the puppet stage, thus arousing female jealousy among the nitwits. stacks, and continues to St. Germain, St. Cloud, and Versailles, twelve miles away. Standing in the Place du Carrousel and looking up that incomparable vista past the obelisk in the taxi-infested Place de la Concorde, one can almost forgive the de structive mania of the Communards, for it was they who, by burning the Tuileries Palace, opened this view toward the sun sets. The Tuileries Gardens seem to have been laid out with square and compass (page 513). As if fresh from a beauty shop, Paris here challenges "Am I not fair?" Yes, more than fair, for this combination of promenade and garden, forest and art gallery, playground and yacht pond, woos with friendliness as well as artifice. Children adore that honest artisan and artist Pere Guignol, who carves and paints his puppets, including Punch and Judy, and then gives them voice and action in his little theater among the trees. Lovers sit beside nurses who tend to their knitting. Students read, artists paint, and even self-satisfied bureaucrats from near by offices become human. Down the pearly distances at dusk a thousand motorcars sparkle like diamonds on the Champs Elysees, which mounts toward the flickering flame loyal men renew each night above the tomb of the Unknown Warrior (page 518). MUSEUMS BY THE SCORE EPITOMIZE PARIS HISTORY Paris, with its scores of museums, is it self more wonderful than any of them. But how understand Paris without visiting the collections in which its history is epit omized? At the Carnavalet Museum, pictured in 16th-century tapestry, one sees the shops which formerly lined the Bridge of the Money Changers, or the Place Vendome, usually so empty, as it looked when filled with the Army of the Orient, in 1855. Here is the First Republic's Magna Carta, the tables of the Rights of Man; here a key of the Bastille and the rooms where Ma dame de Sevigne lived and wrote. Throughout my visit to Paris the bill boards were covered with posters for the National Lottery. "Try your luck," urged the Government. The Carnavalet, keyed 506
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