urbon took their places beside him. The cortege
then took up its march. From Tinqueux to Rheims, the royal coach,
gleaming with gold, passed under a long arcade of triumphal arches
adorned with streamers and foliage. From the gates of the city to the
Cathedral, flowers strewed the sand that covered the ground. All the
houses were hung with carpets and garlands; at all the windows, from
all the balconies, from all the roofs, innumerable spectators shouted
their acclamations; the cortege advanced to the sound of all the bells
of the city, and to the noise of a salvo of artillery of one hundred
and one guns. The King was received under a dais at the door of the
metropolitan church, by the Archbishop of Rheims in his pontifical
robes, and accompanied by his suffragans, the Bishops of Soissons,
Beauvais, Chalons, and Amiens. The Archbishop presented the holy water
to the sovereign, who knelt, kissed the Gospels, then was escorted
processionally into the sanctuary. His prie-dieu was placed at fifteen
feet from the altar, on a platform, about which was a magnificent
canopy hung from the ceiling of the Cathedral.

The Dauphiness had entered her gallery with the Duchess of Berry and
the princesses of the blood. The Archbishop celebrated the vespers, and
then the Cardinal de La Fare ascended the pulpit and delivered a sermon
in which he said:--

"God of Clovis, if there is here below a spectacle capable of
interesting Thy infinite Majesty, would it not be that which in this
solemnity fixes universal attention and invites and unites all prayers?
These days of saintly privilege, in which the hero of Tolbiac, and
thirteen centuries after him, the sixty-fifth of his successors have
come to the same temple to receive the same consecration, can they be
confounded with the multitude of human events, to be buried and lost in
the endless annals? To what, O great God! if not to the persistence of
Thy immutable decrees, can we attribute, on this earth, always so
changing and mobile, the supernatural gift of this miraculous duration?"

The Cardinal covered with praises not only the King, but the Dauphin,
the Dauphiness, the Duchess of Berry, the Duke of Bordeaux. He cried:--

"Constantly happy as King, may Charles X. be constantly happy as father!

"May his paternal glances always see about him, shining with a
brilliancy that nothing can change, this family so precious, the
ornament of his court, the charm of his life, the future of Fran