Champagne & Catsup

The barman at Harry's New York Bar on the Rue Daunou ran a moody eye over his orderly customers, wiped a glass and remembered sadly, "We used to have four times as many Americans in here. They drank four times as much and got into four times as many fights."

Other Parisian hosts, however, had little time for such sentimental regrets. This year's tourists might be better behaved than the old, carefree variety, but during the 1949 season they had flocked to France almost 3,000,000 strong to swell the nation's economy with $195 million worth of foreign exchange and provide the biggest tourist year since 1927. Every Sunday for two months 25,000 gawkers had shuffled through the Palace at Versailles to gape at the Sun King's old splendors. The Eiffel Tower had not had so many visitors since 1889. Bus tours that offered "Paris by night" (2,500 francs with champagne included) did a rushing business.

The Americans over whom Harry's barman gloomed were outnumbered this year by half a million Britons, 900,000 Belgians, 400,000 Swiss, 150,000 Scandinavians and 90,000 Spaniards. The 200,000 from the U.S., however, had left some $78 million behind to provide France with her biggest single chunk of hard currency outside the Marshall Plan. The 1949 American tourists were younger, poorer and more serious-minded than before, but Paris' barmen happily reported that they still outdrank everyone else, with the Swedes and Britons running second and third. And just to prove that there were still 100% Americans in the crowd, there were some, groaned the weekly Samedi-Soir in feigned unhappiness, "who asked for catsup with the canard presse."

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