of rough stone daubed with cement of the colour of Valbonnais mustard,
and on the other by a graveyard. The horizon is a circle of cones, of
dry scoriæ, like pumice, or covered with short grass; above them, the
glassy slope of perpetual ice and snow; to walk on, a scanty growth of
grass moth-eaten by sand. In two words, to sum up the scene, it was
nature's scab, the leprosy of the earth.

"From the artistic point of view, on this microscopic grand parade,
close to the spring whose waters are caught in pipes with taps, three
bronze statues stand in different spots. One, a Virgin, in the most
preposterous garments, her headgear a sort of pastry-mould, a Mohican's
bonnet, is on her knees weeping, with her face hidden in her hands. Then
the same Woman, standing up, her hands ecclesiastically shrouded in her
sleeves, looks at the two children to whom she is speaking; Maximin,
with hair curled like a poodle, twirling a cap like a raised pie, in his
hand; Mélanie buried in a cap with deep frills and accompanied by a dog
like a paper-weight--all in bronze. Finally the same Person, once more
alone, standing on tip-toe, her eyes raised to heaven with a
melodramatic expression.

"Never has the frightful appetite for the hideous that disgraces the
Church in our day been so resolutely displayed as on this spot; and if
the soul suffered in the presence of the obtrusive outrage of this
degrading work--perpetrated by one Barrême of Angers and cast in the
steam foundries of Le Creusot--the body too had something to endure on
this plateau under the crushing mass of hills that shut in the view.

"And yet it was hither that thousands of sick creatures had had
themselves hauled up to face the cruel climate, where in summer the sun
burns you to a cinder while, two yards away, in the shade of the church,