TRAVELING IN STYLE : AN EXISTENTIALIST IN SANTA FE : Decadent Artists, Garish Souvenir Shops, Southwestern-Style Furnishings? One Noted French Observer Found Them All in New Mexico Half a Century Ago.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the most romantic and mysterious of American capitals, famous for its beauty, its putative spiritual energy, its sense of decorative style. It is also one of the hottest tourist destinations in the country right now, its once-quiet back streets filling up with new mock-adobe hotels, its shops crowded with fancy salsas and coyote doodads. Even worse, locals complain, big-spending, loud-talking outsiders from places like Los Angeles and New York City are actually buying property there, moving in.

In 1948, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), famed French novelist and essayist, author of “The Mandarins” and “The Second Sex” and longtime companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, visited Santa Fe while traveling across the country on a Greyhound bus with a female friend she describes only as N. She recorded her impressions of the place (and of the United States as a whole) in a book called “L’Amerique au jour de jour,” published here in 1953 under the title “America Day by Day, “ in a translation by Patrick Dudley. As this edited excerpt from the book indicates, the Santa Fe she describes was considerably calmer and less crowded than it is today. But it is also evident that the “Santa Fe style” had already begun to spread beyond its roots, and that the town was already popular with people who, as it were, were coming from someplace else.

Santa Fe is situated on a plateau more than a mile above sea level; at 11 o’clock in the morning in the bright sunshine, it was delightfully fresh. With the very first look we were charmed by this small Spanish town which one can cover on foot, like a good old European town, and which is, nevertheless, a real city, not an overgrown village. After New York and Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, what a delightful change!

The streets twist about, and there are no right angles: most of the houses are built in the Mexican style, with adobe walls and no windows. The central square is surrounded by arcades, as in Madrid or Avila. The big Hotel La Fonda--alas! full--resembled an African village, with its clay walls and battlements. There were few cars; people walked in the sunshine; they had black hair and spoke Spanish, and the women did not have the long legs of the mannequins on the Riviera, but their eyes shone, and they were warm and alive. On the square, people talked and sauntered, as on the ramblas of Barcelona in olden times. Indians in tidy costumes sold silver and turquoises. The objects in the curio shops had an air of the bazaar, but they were no less picturesque. N. and I continued to explore the town. We climbed as far as the ethnographic museum, built on a promontory some two miles from the plaza . The view was striking from there. It had the generous breadth and virgin freshness of mountains and deserts in the Far West, yet it was orderly like a Spanish or Italian landscape; its immensity was measured and harmonious, and I should have liked to return there every evening and look at it and like it more each time.

We went down by taxi to Canyon Road. It is a small street at the foot of Santa Fe, which reminds one of Greenwich Village or Montparnasse. Painters, musicians, poets--they are often all these at once--live here in little wooden houses arranged as studios. The Indians remain pretty well immune to the influence of the whites; but, on the other hand, the whites who live here are profoundly influenced by the Indians. They acquire a taste for brilliant colors, hand-weaving and frontier days: a taste for quality. While the average American has no gauge of value other than an abstract one--money--the intellectuals of Santa Fe are aware of subtler gradations: one cannot live with impunity in a state of intimacy with these masks, these dolls and all these familiar and magical objects for which there is no equivalent monetary value. The influence is first felt in the furnishings--rugs, blankets, curios; everyone tries to acquire the rarest.

We crossed a vacant lot and reached a small brightly lighted house; the painter W., who is also poet and writer, was giving a party. There were two small rooms. The workshop was used as a cloakroom, and in the tiny studio some 10 people were assembled. The smell of paint and oil mingled with tobacco and whiskey. From 10 in the evening until 2 in the morning the house door opened every few minutes to let in new guests.

The men were trying to revive the atmosphere of the old Cafe du Dome before the war; they wore beards, brightly colored shirts, espadrilles and scarves. The women looked as if they had come straight out of the macabre stories of Edgar Allen Poe; chalk-white powder accentuated their pallor, their hair fell on their shoulders, their eyes were staring: they were departed wives who would return to their tombs at dawn. Yet their clothes had a carnival gaiety; often badly cut, they were made from wonderful fabrics from the Indian reserves or from Mexico or Guatemala. They wore exotic jewelry, heavy silver discs, bracelets studded with nails, jade, turquoises and wrought leather. One of them was pregnant under her red and green Mexican costume. Whiskey. Vodka. A painter played Gypsy music on the violin, and a poet sang cowboy songs to a guitar. The guitarist held his liquor well, but the violinist became giddy as the night wore on, and the piercing notes became discordant.

From time to time they carried out a collapsed body into the cloakroom. It was always a man; the women laughed hysterically but retained their balance. People began to leave, bottles were empty, dawn would soon be here. The music stopped, and everyone went off to sleep.