Jack vaulted into the hammock and discovered that previous tenants had thoughtfully punched various peep-holes through the adjoining walls. It would be a drafty hovel in winter, but Jack liked it: he had clear views, and open escape-routes, across roof-tops in several directions. The building across the street had a garret, no farther away from Jack’s entresol than one room in a house was from another, but separated from him by a crevasse sixty or seventy feet deep. This was more typical of the sort of place Jack would expect to dwell (though he could almost hear St.-George telling him that, now that he was a man of wealth, he must set his sights higher). So he could hear the conversations, and smell the food and the bodies, of the people across the way. But, lying there in his hammock, he got to watch them as if their life were a play, and he in the audience. It appeared to be the usual sort of high-altitude bolt-hole for prostitutes on the run from pimps, runaway servants, women pregnant out of wedlock, and youthful peasants who’d walked to Paris expecting to find something.
Jack tried to nap, but it was the middle of the afternoon and he could not sleep with Paris happening all around him. So he set out across the roof-tops, memorizing the turns he’d take, the leaps he’d make, the crevices he’d hide in, the places he’d stand and fight, if the Lieutenant of Police ever came for him. This led to his tromping over numerous roof-tops, setting off great commotions and panics among many garret-dwellers who lived in fear of raids. Mostly he had the roof-tops to himself. There were a few Vagabondish-looking children moving in packs, and a large number of roof-rats. On almost every block there were tattered ropes, or frail tree-branches, bridging gaps over streets, not strong enough for humans, but enthusiastically used by rats. In other places the ropes lay coiled neatly on roofs, the sticks rested in rain-gutters. Jack reckoned that they must have been put up by St.-George, who used them to channel and control the migrations of rats, as a general might tear down bridges in one part of a disputed territory while improvising new ones elsewhere.
Eventually Jack descended to street-level, and found that he’d arrived in a better part of town, near the river. He headed, without thinking about it, toward his old playground, the Pont-Neuf. The street was a wiser place for him to be-persons who clambered about on roof-tops were not well thought of-but it was dark, and confined between the stone walls of the buildings. Even the view down the street was closed off by balconies jutting out more than halfway across it from either side. The houses all had great arched portals closed off by ironbound fortress-doors. Sometimes a servant would have one open just at the moment Jack happened by. He’d slow down and look through and get a glimpse down a cool shaded passageway into a courtyard lit with sun, half filled in by landslides of flowers, watered by gurgling fountains. Then the door would be shut. Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls-otherwise, the world’s largest collection of closed and locked doors.
He walked by a statue of King Looie as Roman general in stylish Classical armor with exposed navel. On one side of the pedestal, Winged Victory was handing out loaves to the poor, and on the other, an angel with a flaming sword, and a shield decorated with a trinity of fleur-de-lis, backed up by a cross-swinging, chalice-and-wafer-brandishing Holy Virgin, was assaulting and crushing diverse semi-reptilian demons who were toppling backwards onto a mess of books labelled (though Jack could not read, he knew this) with such names as M. Luther, J. Wycliffe, John Hus, John Calvin.
The sky was opening. Sensing he was near the Seine, Jack lunged forward and finally reached the Pont-Neuf. “Pont” was French for an artificial isthmus of stone, spanning a river, with arches beneath to let the water flow through-pylons standing in the flow, dividing it with their sharp blades; atop, a paved street lined with buildings like any other in Paris, so that you wouldn’t know you were crossing over a river unless a Parisian told you so. But in this one respect the Pont-Neuf was different: it had no buildings, just hundreds of carved heads of pagan gods and goddesses, and so you could see from there. Jack went and did some seeing. Many others had the same idea. Upstream, late-afternoon sunlight set the backs of the buildings on the Pont au Change to glowing; a steady rain of shit flew out of the windows, and was swallowed by the Seine. The river’s crisp stone banks were occluded by a permanent jam of small boats and barges. Newly arriving ones attracted surging riots of men hoping to be hired as porters. Some boats carried blocks of stone that had been cut to shape by freemasons working out in the open, somewhere upstream; these boats pulled up along special quays equipped with cranes powered by pairs of large stepped wheels in which men climbed forever without ascending, turning a gear-train that reeled in a cable that passed over a pulley at the end of a tree-sized arm, hoisting the blocks up out of the boats. The entire crane-wheels, men, and all-could be rotated around and the block dropped into a heavy cart.
Elsewhere, the same amount of labor might’ve made a keg of butter or a week’s worth of firewood; here it was spent on raising a block several inches, so that it could be carted into the city and raised by other workers, higher and higher, so that Parisians could have rooms higher than they were wide, and windows taller than the trees they looked out at. Paris was a city of stone, the color of bone, beautiful and hard-you could dash yourself against it and never leave a mark. It was built, so far as Jack could tell, on the principle that there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. Off to the right, as he looked upstream, was the Ile de la Cite, crowded and looming with important stuff: the twin, square towers of Notre Dame, and the twin, round towers of the Conciergerie, holding out prospects of salvation and damnation like a mountebank telling him to pick a card, any card. The Palais de Justice was there, too, a white stone monster decorated with eagles, ready to pounce.
A dog ran down the bridge trying to escape from a length of chain that had been tied to its tail. Jack strolled to the other side of the river, shrugging off innumerable mountebanks, beggars, and prostitutes. Turning around, he was able to look downstream and across the river toward the Louvre, where the King had lived until Versailles had gotten finished. In the garden of Tuileries, which was now falling into the long shadow of the city’s western wall, trees, planted in neat rows, were being tortured and racked by the King’s gardeners for any deviation from correct form.
Jack was leaning back against a stone wall that had been warmed by the sun, when he heard a faint rustling just behind his head. Turning around, he saw the impression of a small creature, crushed flat, and suspended in the rock-a common enough sight in this type of stone, and known to be a trick of Nature, as when animals were born joined at the hip, or with limbs growing out of the wrong places. The Doctor had another theory: that these had been living beings, trapped and immobilized, imprisoned forever. Now with the weight of all the stone in Paris seeming to press down on him, Jack believed it. He heard that faint rustle again, and scanning the wall carefully, finally saw movement there: between a couple of old scallop-shells and fish-bones, he saw a small human figure, half trapped in the stone, and struggling to get out of it. Peering carefully at this creature, no larger than his little finger, he saw that it was Eliza.