long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a
dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's
dispensation.

For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous
clang.

I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big
with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded
waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great
occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove
all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every
corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense
by the altar-steps.

"_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.