recovered himself, and at last showed himself no less hospitable and
obliging towards us than he to whom we owed the introduction had been,
the day before.

Mr. Widemann then gathered together all his remembrances; he, too, had
retained a vivid recollection of Sand, and he told us among other things
that his father, at the risk of bringing himself into ill odour, had
asked leave to have a new scaffold made at his own expense, so that no
other criminal might be executed upon the altar of the martyr's death.
Permission had been given, and Mr. Widemann had used the wood of the
scaffold for the doors and windows of a little country house standing in
a vineyard. Then for three or four years this cottage became a shrine
for pilgrims; but after a time, little by little, the crowd grew less,
and at the present day, when some of those who wiped the blood from the
scaffold with their handkerchiefs have became public functionaries,
receiving salaries from Government, only foreigners ask, now and again,
to see these strange relics.

Mr. Widemann gave me a guide; for, after hearing everything, I wanted to
see everything. The house stands half a league away from Heidelberg, on
the left of the road to Carlsruhe, and half-way up the mountain-side. It
is perhaps the only monument of the kind that exists in the world.

Our readers will judge better from this anecdote than from anything more
we could say, what sort of man he was who left such a memory in the
hearts of his gaoler and his executioner.