Europe Revised — 32 - Ch. XV: Symptoms of the Disease, pt. 2

The lone diner departed first.

When the party at the other table had had their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus--one of the common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under tents.

Just as they entered, the premier clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring.

Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face: it was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before.

Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown.

His ears were painted bright red--the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown--and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drollest master of pantomime I ever saw.

On leaving the circus, very naturally we went to the cafe--where the first part of the little dinner comedy had been enacted.

We encountered both artists, professional or amateur, of blacklead and bristol board, but we met a waiter there who was an artist--in his line.

I ordered a cigar of him, specifying that the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States.

He brought one cigar on a tray.

In size and shape and general aspect it seemed to answer the required specifications.

The little belly band about its dark-brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular; but no sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died.

So I examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar, artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the genuine articles and had treasured it, no doubt, against the coming of some unsophisticated patron such as I. And I doubt whether that could have happened anywhere except in Paris either.

That is just it, you see.

Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris, the Paris of petty larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your purse.

Go where you will, you cannot escape it.

You journey, let us assume, to the Tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the wide-armed Hotel des Invalides.

From a splendid rotunda you look down to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte; and above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will and testament of him who sleeps here: "I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have so well loved."

And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of thousands of them to massacre and mutilation and starvation; but that is the way of world--conquerors the world over--and has absolutely nothing to do with this tale.

The point I am trying to get at is, if you can gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are a clod.

And if you can get away from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you are a wonder.

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.

You tire of interminable portraits of the Grand Monarch, showing him grouped with his wife, the Old-fashioned Square Upright;

and his son, the Baby Grand; and his prime minister, the Lyre; and his brother, the Yellow Clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra.

You examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisas has come or has passed.

Wandering your weary way past acres of the works of Rubens, and miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of Michelangelos, and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries.

You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.

Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets unaccompanied.

Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards.

All about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner.

As for yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of street life.

That emphatically is all you ask;

merely that and a little privacy.

Are you permitted to have it?

You are not.

Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions.

Sidewalk venders cluster about you.

And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids.

They hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you.

Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize.

Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his steel-pointed tool of trade.

In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of French timetables.

It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled you--it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the realization that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy--that, as Walter Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat--and gets it good!

So you shake the dust from your feet--your own dust, not Paris' dust--and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train from the station.

And as the train draws away from the trainshed you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital.

One of them says: English Spoken Here!

And the other says: Liberality!

Economy!

Frugality!

Chapter XVI