Nodier paid, also trembling, but with joy. This book was the
_Romancero_ complete. There are only three complete copies of
this edition now in existence. One of these a few years ago
sold for 7,500 francs. Moreover, worms are vying with each
other in eating up these three remaining copies. The peoples,
feeders of princes, have something else to do than spend their
money to preserve for new editions the legacies of human
intellect, and the _Romancero_, being merely an Iliad, has not
been reprinted.



During the three days of the coronation there were great
crowds in the streets of Rheims, at the Archbishop's palace,
and on the promenades along the Vesdre, eager to catch a glimpse
of Charles X. I said to Charles Nodier: "Let us go and see his
majesty the cathedral."

Rheims is a proverb in Gothic Christian art. One speaks of the
"nave of Amiens, the bell towers of Chartres, the façade of
Rheims." A month before the coronation of Charles X a swarm of
masons, perched on ladders and clinging to knotted ropes, spent
a week smashing with hammers every bit of jutting sculpture on
the façade, for fear a stone might become detached from one of
these reliefs and fall on the King's head. The debris littered
the pavement and was swept away. For a long time I had in my
possession a head of Christ that fell in this way. It was
stolen from me in 1851. This head was unfortunate; broken by a
king, it was lost by an exile.