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.
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.
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