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!
