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.