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. 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.