When Christopher (for it was none other) stood in the sun, which he always tried to do, the golden light gleamed off the copper and hung in the steam and glittered off his golden fez-tassel and shone in his embroidered slippers and brass buttons and made him very magnificent, a walking mosque. He switched among French, Spanish, and English in mid-sentence, and he claimed to know all about Jack Shaftoe (whom he addressed as l’Emmerdeur), and tried to give him coffee for free. He had just refilled his tanks upstairs, he explained, and was heavy burdened. St.-George had warned that Christopher would make this offer “because he will want to calculate how much money you are carrying,” and together they had rehearsed a few scenarios of how the coffee-price negotiation might play out. The plan was that Jack would run their side of the dealings, and that St.-George would hover and, at just the right moment, divulge that Jack was looking for a place to stay. Jack had never said as much to St.-George, but then it was not necessary; this was why one approached St.-George upon one’s arrival in the Marais. His work took him into every building-especially to the parts of buildings where people like Jack were apt to stay.

To accept coffee for free was to demean oneself; to overpay was to publicly shame Christopher, by implying that he was the sort of man who cared about something as low and dirty as money; to merely agree on a fair price was to proclaim oneself a simpleton, and accuse Christopher of the same. Arduous haggling, however, laid bare the soul and made the participants blood-brothers. In any event the matter was settled-to the relief of the wig-maker, who stood wringing his hands as this one-legged Vagabond, fat pseudo-Turk, and rat-catcher shouted at each other directly in front of his shop, scaring away business. Meanwhile St.-George was striking a deal of his own with the wig-maker. Jack was too busy to eavesdrop, but he gathered that St.-George was using his influence to get Jack a room, or at least a corner, upstairs.

Just so: after a ceremonial cup of coffee in the street, Jack bid adieu to St.-George (who had immediate responsibilities in the cellar) and to Christopher (who had coffee to vend), stepped through the tiny door, and began to ascend stairs-past the wig-maker’s shop on the ground level, and then, on the first story, his dwelling-the fine parts of it anyway, such as parlour and dining-room. Then a story for the family bedchambers. Then a story where his servants had their quarters. Then one he had rented out to a tradesman of lesser rank. As the storys mounted, the quality plunged. In the bottom levels the walls and steps alike were solid stone, but this gave way to wooden steps and plaster walls. As Jack continued to climb, the plaster developed cracks, then began to bulge and flake off the lath. At the same time, the stair-steps became creaky, and began to flex beneath his weight. In the top story there was no plaster on the walls at all, just birds’ nests of straw and wattle spanning gaps among timbers. Here, in one large room interrupted by a few struts to shore up the roof, lived Christopher’s family: countless Armenians sleeping and sitting on squarish bales of coffee-beans. A ladder in the corner gave access to the roof, whereupon a sort of lean-to shack, called by the grand name of entresol, had been improvised. A sailor-hammock hung corner-to-corner. Several bricks were shoved together to form a pad where a fire could be lit. On the tile roof downhill of the entresol, a tissue of brown streakage gave a hint as to where previous occupants had done their shitting and pissing.

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.