Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane
and polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey
miles away from this spot to the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise.
You trudge past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of
monuments and mausoleums; you view the storied urns and animated
busts that mark the final resting-places of France's illustrious
dead. And as you marvel that France should have had so many
illustrious dead, and that so many of them at this writing should
be so dead, out from behind De Musset's vault or Marshal Ney's
comes a snoopy, smirky wretch to pester you to the desperation
that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture post cards and his
execrable wooden carvings.
You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that
shrine of every American who knows his Mark Twain - the joint grave
[Footnote: Being French, and therefore economical, those two are,
as it were, splitting one tomb between them.] of Hell Loisy and
Abie Lard [Footnote: Popular tourist pronunciation.] and lo, in
the very shadow of it there lurks a blood brother to the first
pest! I defy you to get out of that cemetery without buying something
of no value from one or the other, or both of them. The Communists
made their last stand in Pere Lachaise. So did I. They went down
fighting. Same here. They were licked to a frazzle. Ditto, ditto.
Next, we will say, Notre Dame draws you. Within, you walk the
clattering flags of its dim, long aisles; without, you peer aloft
to view its gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares
caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The
spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the
little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the
tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on
you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that
should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws
from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs - things which no
decent man could look at without gagging and would not carry about
with him on his person for a million dollars in cash. By threats
and hard words you drive him off; but seeing others of his kind
drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in mind
except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where
the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for
a few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river
and presently you find yourself - at least I found myself there - in
one of the very few remaining quarters of old Paris, as yet untouched
by the scheme of improvement that is wiping out whatever is medieval
and therefore unsanitary, and making it all over, modern and slick
and shiny.
Losing yourself - and with yourself your sense of the reality of
things - you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses
with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids
like hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers
and coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of
song; and on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one
another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences, is a
strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there
is a rich, nutritious garlicky smell too; and against a jog in
the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag-picker is asleep on a pile
of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not
guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have moved since I
was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both
of being permanent fixtures.
You pass a little church, lolling and lopped with the weight of
the years; and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars
and soft half-lights, and twinkling candles set upon the high
altar. Not even the jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress
up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely
dispel its abiding, brooding air of peace and majesty. You linger
a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of
parts might have frequented the while he penned his versified
inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily
answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows
that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.
Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall and an ancient
gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house,
and you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak
a warning and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from
under the slewed arch will issue a most gallant swashbuckler with
his buckles all buckled and his swash swashing; hence the name.
At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder. You spin on
your heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword. But 'tis
not Master Francois Villon, in tattered doublet, with a sonnet.
Nor yet is it a jaunty blade, in silken cloak, with a challenge.
It is your friend of the obscene photograph collection. He has
followed you all the way from 1914 clear back into the Middle Ages,
biding his time and hoping you will change your mind about investing
in his nasty wares.
With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre. You look on
the Winged Victory and admire her classic but somewhat bulky
proportions, meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must
have been a mighty hard battle the lady won, because she lost her
head and both arms in doing it.
