About Paris — Inside the Classic

The Street as a Stage

Davis’s opening chapter establishes the street as a theater of ordinary life. He notes that important people used it only as a shortcut to the Rue de Rivoli or Rue Castiglione, but for those who lived there, it was endlessly interesting. The details are concrete: sidewalks without damp sawdust or marble-topped tables, no jewellers’ windows to catch the eye. What makes the street compelling is the human activity—the concierge at the door, neighbors leaning from windows. This observational method, grounded in a specific location, recurs throughout the excerpts.

Later, when describing the funeral procession of President Carnot, Davis again focuses on the crowd’s behavior: citizens camping overnight on the Champs-Élysées, erecting stands by lantern light, sleeping under carts. He compares the scene to a bivouac or a besieged city. The emphasis is not on the official ceremony but on the makeshift encampment of spectators, the five hundred people taken to hospitals, the men perched for six hours on Tuileries vases like Stylites on his pillar. Davis consistently treats the street as a stage for collective action.

Political Spectacle and the New President

The excerpts include a striking passage imagining the drive of a new French president from Versailles to Paris. Davis speculates on the president’s feelings: the sweetness of that moment when power first touched him, the cheering crowds, the galloping horses. He notes that very few men have taken that drive, and that Casimir-Perier’s brief term included many imbitterments that might not erase the memory of that ride. This is not reportage of a specific event but a reflective set piece, blending observation with empathy.

Davis’s account of Carnot’s funeral procession is more detailed and concrete. He describes the barricade of tables, boxes, and ladders stretching from the Avenue Marigny to the Place de la Concorde, the four thousand people encamped, the sound of boards falling like musketry. The procession itself is summarized quickly; the focus remains on the crowd’s preparation and endurance. This pattern—privileging the spectators over the spectacle—runs through the excerpts and suggests Davis’s journalistic instinct for the human story behind public events.

Americans in Paris: A Colony Observed

The final chapter, “Americans in Paris,” is represented in the excerpts only by its title and a few illustration captions. One caption reads “The American colony is not wicked,” and another shows a scene of Americans “standing on their feet for hours at a time.” These fragments hint at a portrait of expatriate life that likely contrasts with the more sensational accounts common in the period. Davis, himself an American journalist based in Paris, was well positioned to observe his countrymen abroad.

The illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson, which accompany the text throughout, are an integral part of the work. Gibson’s drawings—such as the frontispiece “Paris had taken off her mourning” and scenes of Montmartre nightlife—provide a visual counterpart to Davis’s prose. The combination of text and image was a hallmark of Harper & Brothers’ travel books in the 1890s, and About Paris is a notable example of this genre, offering both a reporter’s observations and an artist’s impressions of the city.

Readers approaching About Paris should expect a series of discrete sketches rather than a systematic tour. Davis moves from street-level observation to grand public ceremonies, always attentive to the people who populate the scene. The excerpts suggest that the book’s value lies in its specific, grounded details—the concierge at the door, the crowd sleeping under carts, the imagined ride of a new president. Gibson’s illustrations, though not reproduced here, are essential to the work’s character. This is a journalist’s Paris, not a poet’s, and it rewards attention to the small moments that accumulate into a portrait of a city.

That afternoon, the Paris rain blurred the window as Davis watched processions from his café perch, a journalist's patient eye finding stories in passing umbrellas. Later, restless, I drifted to his shelf-mate, a quieter voice tracing rivers instead of boulevards. Both simply observed, unhurried. His South American notes felt like the same rain, falling somewhere farther south. Notes of a naturalist in South America — Inside the Classic became my evening’s companion, a different street, same wandering attention.