On Certain People Who Are Beyond Help

It is a sad testimony to the underdeveloped amour-propre of most of the great European cities that so very few of them — at any rate, none of the German cities — have anything like the handy, minutely detailed, and durable map that exists for Paris. I refer to the excellent publication by Taride, with its twenty-two maps of all the Parisian arrondissements and the parks of Boulogne and Vincennes. Whoever has stood on a streetcorner of a strange city in bad weather and had to deal with one of those large paper maps — which at every gust swell up like a sail, rip at the edges, and soon are no more than a little heap of dirty colored scraps with which one torments oneself as with the pieces of a puzzle — learns from the study of the Plan Taride what a city map can be. People whose imagination does not wake at the perusal of such a text, people who would not rather dream of their Paris experiences over a map than over photos or travel notes, are beyond help.