Don Martin diary entry for Friday,
March 15, 1918:
Went to a theater
tonight – the Follies Bergere – and saw a pretty good show. N.Y. would never
permit the things that go on there.
[Burn] Price and I went after having dinner at a
well known Italian place on a walk all through the Montmartre section which is
very picturesque. Went up on the highest hill in Paris and surveyed the city.
Earlier in the day I had walked about for a couple of hours. Bought some nice
Easter cards and mailed them to Dorothy. Great excitement in the afternoon.
Terrific explosion which made everyone think we were having a daylight raid.
Powder magazine in St. Denis blew up. The Crillon Hotel shook and windows
broken in many parts of the city. See hundreds of American soldiers everywhere
in Paris.
Weather splendid.
On March 14, Don Martin sent
a letter to Dorothy he had translated at the Paris Herald office into French, to see if she would be able to read it.
He explained about this letter to his Mother in a letter to her dated March 15.
In it he also commented on his limited ability in French, almost – but not
quite - admitting regret that he did not as a boy take the opportunity to learn
French from his French Mother (who taught Dorothy French when she came under
her care).
Mother,
I just wrote a letter to Dorothy which I’ll
bet will make her laugh. If it takes you as long to read it as it took me to
write it, your housework will be neglected for a day. You needn’t tell Dorothy
for a while how I did it. I got one of the men in our office here to compose it
for me after I had written in English what I wanted to say. I am very anxious
to know how much of it Dorothy could read herself.
I wish now I had learned French,
although it isn’t exactly necessary. Almost everyone here understands a little
English and this combined with pocket money and a few words of French enables
an American to get along.
In that
letter he also reported on his exploration of Paris, the Crillon hotel and
French cuisine:
I have gone all over the city, walking
and in a taxi cab and can find my way readily enough now. This hotel is a very
beautiful one. It overlooks the Tuilleries Gardens, and just beyond them is the
Seine. The Louvre is but ten minutes walk and the Palace Royal, the Madeleine,
the Royal Opera House and the Champs Elysees but a stone’s throw off. Mr.
Bennett engaged a room for me here, and he is no “piker.” ... The streets are
crowded and the displays in the hundreds of jewelry and modiste’s shops are
wonderful. I now see where New York gets its ideas.
The food is the best in Paris. London
is like corned beef and cabbage and Paris like a dainty salad. Eating is an art
and an institution all over France, but it comes high. To get an ordinary
dinner in this hotel costs from $4 to $7 [$70-120 in today's dollars]. For instance, a confiture or jelly
costs 80 cents [$14] an order. Chocolate costs 50 cents [$9] for a small pot. But
everything is the very best. The prices are not much higher than normal.
And he
commented on the air raids in Paris, his hope to get up toward the front and
how he would be to stay safe:
I am just as careful during air raids
as anyone can be. The one here the other night was a very bad one but I stayed
in the hotel. The Secretary of War and many other very prominent persons were
in the lobby. So if we had been hit, the Germans would have got a somewhat
distinguished gathering. ... About 60 women and children were killed in a
stampede in the subway the other night. They had gone there for safety and a
few fell off the platform, whereupon the stampede followed.
I am rather counting on going to the
American front on Monday, March 17. I don’t know how long I shall stay. If
living conditions are as bad as some of the correspondents say, I think a few
weeks will do me. I have permission – military passes etc – in my pocket now. I
shall be close enough to see all the detail of battle but will be either far
enough back from the actual firing line, or underground to be entirely safe. No
correspondent has even been hurt, nor even scared so far as I know.
A final
note was his reference to his French ancestors that he might look into:
By the way will you have [his brother] Rock send me
a list of those ancestral names and addresses? I have them somewhere but don’t
just know where to place my hands on them, and if they are not to be found, a
duplicate list will probably reach me in time.
Don Martin
also sent a letter to Dorothy dated March 15 enclosing some Easter
cards, and telling about a children’s game:
I was out on the Champs Elysees this
afternoon and saw more than a thousand children playing there. There were both
poor and rich. Most of them spin tops and have a sort of whip which they cut or
sweep under the top while it is spinning – that keeps it going. It is a very
popular sport with the youngsters of Paris.
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