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.
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