Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets unaccompanied.

Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards.  All about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner.  As for yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of street life.  That emphatically is all you ask; merely that and a little privacy.  Are you permitted to have it?  You are not.

Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions.  Sidewalk venders cluster about you.  And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids.  They hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you.  Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize.  Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his steel-pointed tool of trade.

In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of French timetables.

It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled you—­it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the realization that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy—­that, as Walter Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat—­and gets it good!

So you shake the dust from your feet—­your own dust, not Paris’ dust—­and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train from the station.  And as the train draws away from the trainshed you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital.

One of them says:  English Spoken Here!

And the other says:  Liberality!  Economy!  Frugality!

Chapter XVI