of him disgorge his plunder,
and then we'll start a fresh deal. As for the Germans, my dear sir, I
dare say there are a lot of jolly good fellows amongst them, and plenty
who would take a bumper, a _canon de vin_, with us, if they were here
now, and drink to the perdition of the bourgeois."

"That is all very well," I answered, "but I'm pretty sure you were just
like the rest, and went tearing along the boulevards and shouting 'A
Berlin!' And you would have been only too jolly glad to get the Rhine,
if you had had a----"

"The Rhine, monsieur!" he interrupted me, "the Rhine! Do you think I
know what the blessed thing is; and, supposing we had got it, do you
think they'd have given me any of it?"

That was twenty-eight years ago, and since then many a workman has
learnt that he does not get his share of the "blessed thing" he has to
fight for. I wonder whether he will give up fighting, or whether he will
see to it that he gets his share.

It was an impressive sight that met the eye in the Place Vendome. There
was the famous column lying prostrate in huge fragments like so many
mill-stones, with the bronze legends commemorating the conqueror's
march, battered and crushed out of all seeming in their fall. Those
gigantic vertebrae of the mighty pillar made one ponder on the
vicissitudes of greatness, and on the ups and downs of heroic symbols.
One could not help marvelling at the audacity of the men who had
ruptured that spinal cord of patriotic self-glorification.

It was an artist, and a great one too, who planned and directed the
destruction of the work of art, Courbet, the most uncompromising of
painters and of demagogues. I was living in Paris at the time his first
great works were exhibited, and I recollect what a storm of abuse they
raised. His "Enterrement a Ornans," a large and striking picture,
crudely realistic, depicting, as it did, mourners at the open grave,
with reddened noses and swollen eyes, was considered a deliberate insult
offered to all idealists, romanticists, and mannerists. His picture, "La
Baigneuse," was simply derided by the critics; there was no drawing, no
modelling. "C'est un sac de noix!" A bag of nuts, not a woman of flesh
and blood.

Well, Courbet's work has outlived criticism; history remembers him as a
_chef d'ecole_.

The only time I recollect meeting him was on the occasion of an
international gathering of artists in Antwerp in 1861. He was quite a
boon companion, and had a ma