At eight he broke his right arm, but became as if by magic ambidextrous,
whilst confined to bed, cheerily drawing all day long with the left
hand. At ten he witnessed a grand public ceremony. In 1840 Strasburg
celebrated the inauguration of a monument to Gutenberg, the festival
being one of extraordinary splendour. Fifteen cars represented the
industrial corporations of the city, each symbolically adorned, and in
each riding figures suitably travestied and occupied, men, women and
children wearing the costumes of the period represented. Among the
corporations figured the _Peintres-verriers_, or painters on stained
glass, their car proving especially attractive to one small looker-on.

Intoxicated by the colour and movement of the fete, garlanded and
beflagged streets, the symbolic carriages, the bands, civic and
military, and the prevailing enthusiasm, the child determined to get up
an apotheosis of his own: in other words, to repeat the performance on a
smaller scale. Which he did. Cars, costumes, banners and decorations
were all designed by this imp of ten. With the approval of his
professors and the collaboration of his school-fellows, the Dore
procession, consisting of four highly decorated cars, drawn by boys,
defiled before the college authorities and made the round of the
cathedral, the youthful impresario at its head. The car of the painters
on glass was conspicuously elaborate, a star copied from a Cathedral
window showing the superscription, _G. Dore, fecit_. Small wonder is it
that the adoring mother of an equally adoring son should have believed
in him from the first, and seen in these beginnings the dawn of genius,
the advent, indeed, of a second Michael Angelo or Titian.

The more practical father might chide such overreaching vaticinations,
might reiterate--