re appropriate term, I must call the
ranks of mourners. For a moment only; the next, he was back by my side:
but I noticed that he was frightfully agitated. He probably saw my
concern for him in my face, for, though I asked him no questions, he
said of his own accord, "It is all right. I just caught sight of a woman
who saved my life, and, by the looks of her, she is in great straits,
but, by the time I got out of the crowd, she had disappeared. I have an
idea of the errand she was bent upon, and will inquire to-morrow, but I
am afraid it will be of very little use."

I kept silent for a moment or two, but my curiosity was aroused, for, I
repeat, at that time, the artistic world was ringing with the name of
David d'Angers.

"I did not know you had been in such great danger," I said at last.

"Very few people do know it," he replied sadly; "besides, it happened a
good many years ago, when you were very young. The next time we meet I
will tell you all about it."

A week or so afterwards, as I was leaving the Cafe de Paris one evening,
and going to the tobacconist at the corner of the Rue Laffite, I ran
against the celebrated sculptor. The weather was mild, and we sat
outside Tortoni's, where he told me the story, part of which I give in
his own words, as far as I can remember them after the lapse of more
than forty years.

"If there were any need," he began, "to apologize to an Englishman for
my sympathy with the Philhellenism which shortened the life of Byron, I
might say that I sucked the principle of the independence of nations
with the mother's milk, for I was born in 1789. Be that as it may, when
Marcos Botzaris fell at Missolonghi I felt determined that he should
have a monument worthy of his heroism and patriotism, as far as my
talents could contribute to it. I was sufficiently young to be
enthusiastic, and, at the same time, sufficiently presumptuous to
imagine that I could do something which had never been done before. You
have seen the engraving of the monument; you may judge for yourself how
far I succeeded. But the idea of the composition, however out of the
common, was, I am bound to admit, not the offspring of my own
imagination. I was, perhaps, clever enough to see the poesy of it when
presented to me, and to appropriate it; but the young, fragile girl
lying on the tombstone and tracing the name of Marcos Botzaris was
suggested to me by a scene I witnessed one day at Pere-la-Chaise. I saw
a child stoo