Portrait Of Romania

excerpt It's lunch time. Instinctively, I make for Calea Victoriei, where this hour is set for the fashionable to meet between the Royal Palace and [Elisabeta] Boulevard, as on rue Vivienne during the Restoration.The beautiful shops that border the narrow sidewalks of this beautiful old road display, in very refined taste, the dresses, hats, shawls of our couturiers and milliners, our perfumes, books and magazines (who can't speak our language in Bucharest?), English tweeds, London mufflers, Milan hats, embroideries, silk, transparent Romanian linen, next to superb fruits, local delicatessen and, in splendid drugstores, French and German pharmaceuticals in a cutthroat competition with each other. All these diverse stores aim at luring the buyer who lingers on, moves about, chats. How far these shop windows, that would never strike a false note on rue de la Paix or Karnterstrasse, are from the stodgy displays in Pest, the massive windows in Belgrade and the naïve, peasant ones in Sofia, or the gaudy, jumbled ones in Pera and Galata, although all these capitals are in close vicinity of Bucharest! By what miracle does Calea Victoriei remind of Vienna and, especially, Paris, as well as – due to the look of the passersby – of the Corso in Rome?They're the same men, wearing gorgeous neckties, dressed up to the nines. Officers, when not in the khaki campaign uniform, obviously inspired by the British, wear uniforms almost similar to the new Italian ones, and as glossy. Both Latin peoples show an equal penchant for aigrettes, feathers and ribbons. The street is colored thus.Soon, the fascinated, bewildered, conquered foreigner walking in the street is mesmerized by the ladies, sometimes with a bit too much make-up on, but stylish and charming, with their dark, southern eyes glowing with freshness. The roadway does not lag behind the sidewalk. Only in Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid run so many automobiles and taxis made by famous American companies. This parade of luxury, so uncommon in the new Europe, astounds and puzzles. Are these people richer than elsewhere? Unlikely. But they have an innate zest for pomp, a sense of, and concern in, external elegance. The hard times do not rule out their light, frivolous, cheerful air at all. Let's not jump to conclusions, though! We are in the East, the land of miracles.The autumnal sun fondles the bodyworks, the women's red lips, the elegant suits of the gentlemen, the royal insignia painted on the Capsa coffee-house windows, the nonstop bustle of vehicles and pedestrians. And here are the paperboys running up and down the street barefoot, in tatters, with tall black fur hats, and shouting out the names of the daily newspapers. God knows how many of them there are!In the hubbub of the crowd, street vendors sell fruit and vegetables from wicker or wooden baskets hanging at the ends of a pole they carry on their shoulders, in Turkish fashion. Among Rolls-Royces, Hispano-Suizas and Packards, horses with white harnesses driven by Russians belonging to a mysterious sect of voluntary eunuchs. The blue or red ribbons tied to the blinders are supposed to protect the horses against the evil eye. Seated on the sidewalk, behind round baskets, sighing and sniveling Gypsy women in orange, mauve or crimson skirts offer chrysanthemums to the passersby. Their grandmothers were still slaves. A wedding parades by in carriages. The windows of the newlyweds' brougham are adorned with orange flower garlands. Is this a remnant of the curtains that sealed hermetically the carriages of Ottoman day-trippers? But in front of the Officers' Club, the street takes me back to the Montmartre of my childhood, while the Louis XV salons at the Capsa bring to mind [the playwright] Siraudin from the wasp-waist era, and the next-door café, with its gray framed mirrors hung on bleak, ashen walls, where journalists and parliamentarians meet, calls to mind the atmosphere of patrician Rome at the time of Giolitti. Only a few steps away, the gigantism of the New-York-style skyscraper of the telephone company administration towers above the National Theater, gracious like a china figurine, built at the time of the Second Empire.The new neighborhoods are full of modern buildings; the one mentioned above, however, constitutes an exception in this busy, noisy, funny center that, by and large, remains indebted to all the styles that Europe embraced between 1860 and 1913. In this interval, Bucharest became more and more Western, with a vengeance one may say. In parallel with the consolidation of the autonomy of Wallachia, the United Principalities [Moldavia and Wallachia] are born, the Old Kingdom is established, and the former little state begins to thrive. Everything preserving an Oriental air in the city is the vestige of ancient times, when it looked to Byzantium, or was under Ottoman rule. This beautiful, young capital that eighty years ago had no storied buildings and paved streets is, nevertheless, an old, beautiful city. Better than stone, its soul evokes its long past. Georges Oudard was a well-known personality of French letters between the World Wars. His novels, memoirs and travel books, such as Portrait of Romania, Plon, 1935, in L'Europe vivante collection – were published by the prestigious Grasset, Flammarion, Pierre Lafitte, Calman Levy or Plon publishing houses.


by Georges Oudard