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.
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