e a general, and in that
capacity conducted Louis XVI. to the scaffold, where, as all the world
knows, he ordered the drums to drown the last words of the King. He was
an incorrigible and indefatigable speculator, and while he drove a
roaring trade at Paris in beer, he was always on the look out for
demolished churches and convents in the provinces. Napoleon took his
measure promptly, subsidised and used him to good purpose. Hearing once
that there was a ferment brewing in St.-Antoine, the Emperor sent an
officer to Santerre. 'Go and tell that fellow,' he said, 'that if I hear
one word from the Faubourg St.-Antoine I will have him instantly shot.'

The 'Titanic' and 'transcendental' Faubourg remained as mute as a mouse!

In no French city are the memories of the Revolutionary orgie more
offensively out of key with the actual aspect and the great associations
of the place than in Reims. Whatever may have been the ways of the
working people here forty years ago, I have always been struck by their
quiet and orderly demeanour, as well as by the general air of prosperity
and animation which pervades the city. Its grand Cathedral, the most
consummate type which exists of the great ogival architecture of the
thirteenth century, stands, the archaeologists tell us, on the spot where
the Romans planted their citadel sixteen centuries ago. Like a citadel,
it dominates the whole city to-day; a fortress no longer, like the Roman
citadel, of armed force, but of faith, charity, and hope. Seven
centuries have not shaken the solidity of its massive fabric. They who
built it 'dreamt not of a perishable home.' But only a year ago a
serious dislocation appeared in the framework of the stupendous
rose-window over the grand entrance, and this, with other unsatisfactory
symptoms observable here and there in the building, lend colour to the
theory that the great chalk bed upon which the Cathedral stands may have
been affected by the percolation of water from some deep trenches which,
it seems, were dug near the northern and southern towers at the entrance
of the Cathedral, during the year 1879, and unfortunately left open
during the very inclement winter which followed.

This is a rather alarming theory, particularly if it be true, as it is
said to be, that since 1880 the towers have perceptibly come out of
plumb.

Fortunately the see of Reims is now in the charge of a prelate who fully
appreciates the value to art and to civilisation, as w