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.