as closed, instead of in the morning as I had directed.
In acting thus, I have shown great tolerance; for, in virtue of
Article 13 of the Law of the 7th Vendemiaire of the Year IV.,
circumscribed in its application, but not abrogated by the Law of
the 18th Germinal year X., as is shown by a ministerial decree of
the 7th Fructidor following: 'No sign special to any religion can
be raised, fixed, and attached in any place whatever, so as to
strike the eyes of citizens, except in an enclosure intended for
the exercises of this religion, or in the interior of private
houses, in the studios or warehouses of artists or merchants, or in
public edifices destined to contain monuments of the arts."'

'Then followed a dozen pages of similar twaddle, meant to show that the
mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered
the destruction of every cross set up on a private grave!

'Of course all these laws of the First Republic were long ago shot into
space under the Consulate and the Empire, and of course, even if they
had not been shot into space, a consecrated cemetery is an "enclosure
intended for the exercises of religion." But what did that signify to M.
Petit, who, in a public speech the year after, boasted that he "had not
been married in church, and that his children had never been baptized."

'Did all this give the man any right to destroy and carry away a costly
piece of artistic work, the property of the city?'

Obviously, it is as absurd to expect peace and order in France under a
republic in which men like M. Petit, and M. Spuller, and M. Dauphin, and
M. Goblet are leading friends of the Government, as it would have been
to expect peace and order in the England of the seventeenth century,
when churchwardens--as at Banbury, for example--went about breaking at
night into the churches confided to their care, and smashing the statues
of the saints and defacing the glorious monuments of the past.

After considering all these humours and graces of the most recent French
Republic, as set forth by the senatorial mayor of Amiens, for the
edification of Picardy and France, it was interesting to walk with Mr.
Ruskin from the Place de Perigord up the 'Street of the Three Pebbles,'
past the theatre and the Palais de Justice, to the south transept of
that glorious cathedral which has not as yet been taken down by night,
under the senatorial mayor or his friend