Five minutes later the men he feared and envied came out also, and went their way, passing in single file into the darkness which brooded over the great monolith; beginning, brave hearts, another of the few stages which still lay between them and the guillotine. Then in the cottage there remained only Michel and Jeanne. She sat by the dying embers, silent, and lost in thought. He leaned against the wall, his eyes roving ceaselessly, but always when his gaze met hers it fell. Barbaroux had conquered him. It was not until Jeanne had risen to close the door, and he was alone, that he wrung his hands, and muttered: “Five crowns! Five crowns gone and wasted!”
“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”
Facing this pastel, in an opposite corner of the room, another little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the giant who shook the earth....
How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions. What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen into the dead past!...—A fragment from Loti’s “Book of Pity and of Death.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.
Edward Everett Hale, clergyman and author, born in Boston in 1822, was graduated at Harvard in 1839. While a clergyman, he is perhaps best known to the world as a philanthropist and an author. He has written short stories, novels, juvenile books, works of travel, essays, biography, and history, besides giving much time to his pastoral duties, to preaching, lecturing, and the organization of charities. He founded the magazine “Old and New,” afterward merged in “Scribner’s” (now “The Century”). Two of his short stories, “My Double, and How He Undid Me,” and “The Man Without a Country,” are classics.
Henri Adolphe Stephan Opper, known to the world as M. de Blowitz, born at Blowitz, Bohemia, on December 28, 1825, migrated to France in 1848, and became engaged as professor of the German language and literature at the Lycée of Tours. Here he remained till 1860, when he left to fill, successively, similar posts at Limoges, Poictiers, and Marseilles. He married the daughter of a paymaster of the French Marine. It was not till 1871 that he became a naturalized Frenchman, and, after the French defeat by the Germans, he was a confidant and emissary of both Gambetta and Thiers. His entrance into journalism was as the collaborateur of Lawrence Oliphant, the special correspondent of the “London Times” at Versailles. On Oliphant’s retirement, M. de Blowitz was promoted by the editor of the “Times,” to fill his place. The subsequent career of the great correspondent has been identified with some of the most striking episodes in modern politics and journalism.