But Simon's detestable fraud proved of no use to him. After keeping his treasure for several years, he thought the emperor's coronation presented a favorable opportunity of disposing of it. Unfortunately for him, his grasping avarice one morning suggested a thought which his ignorance prevented his rejecting: "Since this ruby—old-fashioned and stained as it is—can be worth so much, what would be its value if freed from all defect, and in modern setting?" And he soon found a lapidary, who, for a sum of 3000 francs, modernized it, and effaced the spot, and with it the impress, the stamp of its antiquity—all that gave it value, beauty, worth! This wanting, no jeweler could recognize it: it was no longer worth a thousand crowns.
It was thus that the most splendid ruby in Europe lost its value and its fame; and its name is now only to be found in The Lapidaries' Guide, as that which had once been the most costly of gems. It seemed as if it could not survive the last of the illustrious house to which it owed its introduction into Europe, and its name.
IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND IN 1851.
FROM THE LETTERS AND MEMORANDA OF FREDRIKA BREMER.
THE CHOLERA IN LONDON.
It is two years since I first found myself in England. When I was in England in the autumn of 1849, the cholera was there. A dense, oppressive atmosphere rested over its cities, as of a cloud pregnant with lightning. Hearses rolled through the streets. The towns were empty of people; for all who had the means of doing so had fled into the country; they who had not were compelled to remain. I saw shadowy figures, clad in black, stealing along the streets, more like ghosts than creatures of flesh and blood. Never before had I seen human wretchedness in such a form as I beheld it in Hull and in London. Wretchedness enough may be found, God knows, even in Stockholm, and it shows itself openly enough there in street and market. But it is there most frequently an undisguised, an unabashed wretchedness. It is not ashamed to beg, to show its rags or its drunken countenance. It is a child of crime; and that is perhaps the most extreme wretchedness. But it is less painful to behold, because it seems to be suffering only its own deserts. One is more easily satisfied to turn one's head aside, and pass on. One thinks, "I can not help that!"
In England, however, misery had another appearance; it was not so much that of degradation as of want, pallid want. It was meagre and retiring; it ventured not to look up, or it looked up with a glance of hopeless beseeching—so spirit-broken! It tried to look respectable. Those men with coats and hats brushed till the nap was gone; those pale women in scanty, washed-out, but yet decent clothes—it was a sight which one could hardly bear. In a solitary walk of ten minutes in the streets of Hull, I saw ten times more want than I had seen in a ten months' residence in Denmark.
The sun shone joyously as I traveled through the manufacturing districts; saw their groups of towns and suburbs; saw their smoking pillars and pyramids towering up every where in the wide landscape—saw glowing gorges of fire open themselves in the earth, as if it were burning—a splendid and wonderfully picturesque spectacle, reminding one of fire-worshipers, of ancient and modern times, and of their altars. But I heard the mournful cry of the children from the factories; the cry which the public voice has made audible to the world; the cry of the children, of the little ones who had been compelled, by the lust of gain of their parents and the manufacturers, to sacrifice life, and joy, and health in the workshops of machinery; the children who lie down in those beds which never are cold, the children who are driven and beaten till they sink insensibly into death or fatuity—that living death; I heard the wailing cry of the children, which Elizabeth Barrett interpreted in her affecting poem; and the wealthy manufacturing districts, with their towns, their fire-columns, their pyramids, seemed to me like an enormous temple of Moloch, in which the mammon-worshipers of England offered up even children to the burning arms of their god—children, the hope of the earth, and its most delicious and most beautiful joy!
I arrived in London. They told me there was nobody in London. It was not the season in which the higher classes were in London. Besides which, the cholera was there; and all well-to-do people, who were able, had fled from the infected city. And that, indeed, might be the reason why there seemed to me to be so many out of health—why that pale countenance of want was so visible. Certain it is, that it became to me as a Medusa's head, which stood between me and every thing beautiful and great in that great capital, the rich life and physiognomy of which would otherwise have enchanted me. But as it was, the palaces, and the statues, and the noble parks, Hampstead and Piccadilly, and Belgravia and Westminster, and the Tower, and even the Thames itself, with all its everchanging life, were no more than the decorations of a great tragedy. And when, in St. Paul's, I heard the great roar of the voice of London—that roar which, as it is said, never is silent, but merely slumbers for an hour between three and four o'clock in the morning—when I heard that voice in that empty church, where there was no divine worship, and looked up into its beautiful cupola, which was filled by no song of praise, but only by that resounding, roaring voice, a dark chaotic roar, then seemed I to perceive the sound of the rivers of fate rolling onward through time over falling kingdoms and people, and bearing them onward down into an immeasurable grave!—It was but for a moment, but it was a horrible dream!
One sight I beheld in London which made me look up with rejoicing, which made me think "that old Ygdrasil is still budding." This was the so-called metropolitan buildings; a structure of many homes in one great mass of building, erected by a society of enlightened men for the use of the poorer working class, to provide respectable families of that class with excellent dwellings at a reasonable rate, where they might possess that which is of the most indispensable importance to the rich, as well as to the poor, if they are to enjoy health both of body and soul—light, air, and water, pure as God created them for the use of mankind. The sight of these homes, and of the families that inhabited them, as well as of the newly-erected extensive public baths and wash-houses for the same class, together with the assurance that these institutions already, in the second year of their establishment, returned more than full interest to their projectors, produced the happiest impression which I at this time received of England. These were to me as the seed of the future, which gave the promise of verdant shoots in the old tree.