Huge hail-stones joined in the attack,
And dealt Saint Martin many a thwack,
"My poor old head!" he smiling said,
Yet never wished his cape were back.
"He must, he shall," cried Satan, "know
Regret for such an act," and lo,
E'en as he spoke the world was dark
With fog and frost and whirling snow.
Saint Martin, struggling toward his goal,
Mused thoughtfully, "Poor soul! poor soul!
What use to him was half a cloak?
I should have given him the whole."
The cold grew terrible to bear,
The birds fell frozen in the air:
"Fall thou," said Satan, "on the ice
Fall thou asleep, and perish there."
He fell, and slept, despite the storm,
And dreamed he saw the Christ Child's form
Wrapped in the half the beggar took,
And seeing Him, was warm, so warm.
The Arts et Métiers is a museum devoted to the progress of mechanics and the useful crafts: a kind of industrial exhibition, a modern utilitarian Cluny. It is a memorial of the world's ingenuity and the ingenuity of France in particular, and one cannot have a much better reminder that the frivolity of the Grands Boulevards is not all. Apropos, however, of the frivolity of the Grands Boulevards, I may say that the case that was attracting most interest on the Sunday that I was here contained a collection of all the best mechanical toys of the past dozen years, with their dates affixed. The only article in the vast building which seemed to serve no useful purpose was a mirror cracked during the Commune by a bullet, with the bullet still in it. In the square opposite the Musée is the statue of Béranger, who for many years made the ballads of the French nation.
THE PORTE ST. DENIS
(SOUTH FAÇADE)
Returning to the Grands Boulevards once more, we pass first the Porte St. Martin theatre, where the great Coquelin played Cyrano, and where he was rehearsing Chantecler when he died, and then the Ambigu, home of sensational melodrama, and come very shortly to the Place de la République, with its great central monument. The Republic thus celebrated is not merely the Third and present Republic, but all the efforts in that direction which the French have made, as the twelve reliefs round the base will show, for they begin with the scene in the Jeu de Paume in 1789, and end with the National Fête on July 14th, 1880. Paris would still have statues of the République if this were to go, for there is one by Dalou, the sculptor of these bas-reliefs, in the Place de la Nation, and another by Soitoux at the Institut. Dalou (whose work we saw in such profusion at the Little Palace in the Champs-Elysées) made a very spirited and characteristic group, with the Republic standing high on a chariot being drawn by lions and urged forward by an ouvrier and an ouvrière.