Roy, in turn, points to the Virgin. He smiles benignly; he wants to protest that he’s done no damage, only indulged a whim. “Elle est si belle,” he tries, anxious to placate the reddened face and show himself properly appreciative.

“You must leave the museum,” the guard announces loudly.

Roy, amazed to hear a complete English sentence coming out of this cracked old face, defends himself. “I only touched the door,” he protests. Then, “I’m very sorry.”

“You must leave the museum.” Louder this time.

To himself Roy says: This is ridiculous. He can hardly suppress a laugh. Here he is being scolded, reproved, being thrown out of a venerable French museum as if he were a teenage hooligan. He feels his arm firmly taken at the elbow. The old man’s English apparently consists of a single phrase: “You must leave the museum.”

Bewildered, Roy looks about, and then suddenly understands. Everyone is being asked to leave the museum. The sound that a moment ago he had taken for rain was the sound of footsteps moving across the stone floors, of people rapidly leaving the exhibition rooms and heading for the main door. To the stout old guard who is already moving away from him, he mumbles a feeble chant -merci, merci, merci.

There are fifty, sixty people, maybe more, working their way to the entrance-where had they come from? Moments ago Roy had looked around and seen only a handful.

He is struck at first by how orderly the crowd is and how silently it moves along. Not one person is screaming or shouting-no one, in fact, is even talking-and how similar, too, they all seem in their breathy, melancholy, measured strides, hurrying through the calm rectangular rooms of crusted statuary and large loaf-shaped tombs; the tapestries, the porcelain, the examples of medieval glass, the paintings on wood. There is only a rattling, insectlike sound of clothing rubbing, swishing, long purposeful strides moving in waves, in a single direction.

And then something happens: for no discernible reason the gait changes. As though a signal has been given-but there has been no signal-everyone is running, and Roy too is running, squeezing through the narrow arches that divide the rooms, swerving, stumbling on his thick-soled shoes. Even the white-haired, cane-bearing couple seen earlier has somehow, by awkward shifts of weight and sideways lurching, contrived to run. A fat young woman with wild hair, a child under her arm, its head bobbling crazily, runs past Roy, and out of her frilled lips comes a wordless bleat of panic, an oink like a pig’s squeal. And then the two bony American men brush past, one of them knocking against him and breathing a dutiful, constricted pardon.