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.  Not even the jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely dispel its abiding, brooding air of peace and majesty.  You linger a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of parts might have frequented the while he penned his versified inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.

Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall and an ancient gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house, and you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak a warning and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from under the slewed arch will issue a most gallant swashbuckler with his buckles all buckled and his swash swashing; hence the name.

At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder.  You spin on your heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword.  But ’tis not Master Francois Villon, in tattered doublet, with a sonnet.  Nor yet is it a jaunty blade, in silken cloak, with a challenge.  It is your friend of the obscene photograph collection.  He has followed you all the way from 1914 clear back into the Middle Ages, biding his time and hoping you will change your mind about investing in his nasty wares.

With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre.  You look on the Winged Victory and admire her classic but somewhat bulky proportions, meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must have been a mighty hard battle the lady won, because she lost her head and both arms in doing it.  You tire of interminable portraits of the Grand Monarch, showing him grouped with his wife, the Old-fashioned Square Upright; and his son, the Baby Grand; and his prime minister, the Lyre; and his brother, the Yellow Clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra.  You examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisas has come or has passed.  Wandering your weary way past acres of the works of Rubens, and miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of Michelangelos, and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries.  You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.