Portrait of Paris

This is Paris. The great bells of Notre Dame Cathedral chiming across this timeless town, echoing from the river San up to the hill of Montmartre and across to the tip of the Eiffel Tower. And this too is Paris.

A boy and a girl in love in a handsome cab, clipped hopping through theau de bouleunge in the pink dawn of a Paris summer. And this, the cabaret, the nightvots, the popping of champagne corks in the swirl of dancing skirts.

Yes, all these are Paris. But none is exactly Paris. For Paris is many things to many people. It's a two-headed chicken by Picasso, for an artist. It's Madame Curie or Victor Hugo, Balzac and Marcel Proust, to a writer or a student.

Paris is a highly personal place. Each of us has painted his own portrait of Paris. This is mine. CBS Radio presents the CBS Radio Workshop, dedicated to man's imagination, the theater of the mine. Tonight, one man's portrait of Paris, the man David Schonbrunn, CBS Foreign Correspondent, London, winner of this year's overseas Press Club Award for the best reporting from abroad,

and author of the forthcoming book, As France Goes. If any American knows how France goes and why, it is this veteran Paris correspondent, who has been reporting the news from Paris ever since the liberation 12 years ago this summer.

Yet he remains objective, an American observer, with an American wife, and as we shall see, a very American daughter, even though she is a native born Parisian. We take you now by tape to Paris and David Shondron.

This is Paris, oldest, best known, least understood capital in the world. This is a city of contradictions where every valid generalization has an opposite which is equally valid. It is the gayest, saddest, most sinful and most virtuous of cities.