"_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre
Est sujet a ses lois;
Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre
N'en defend point nos rois_."
And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like
suspicion of a scent--a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic,
synthetic and all-embracing--an abstract olfactory symbol of the "Tout
Paris" of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; and fain
would I inhale it in all its pristine fulness and vigour. For scents,
like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this
is a prodigious fine phrase--I hope it means something), and scents
need not be seductive in themselves to recall the seductions of scenes
and days gone by.
Alas! scents cannot be revived at will, like an
"_Air doux et tendre
Jadis aime_!"
Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could evoke all
Paris, sweet, prae-imperial Paris, in a single whiff!
* * * * *
In such fashion did we three small boys, like the three musketeers (the
fame of whose exploits was then filling all France), gather and pile up
sweet memories, to chew the cud thereof in after years, when far away
and apart.
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