laughing, "Biennais must have believed
strongly in me, for political firms often went
bankrupt in those days." As for Edmé
Champion, he recovered his position under the
Empire and the Restoration, under which
latter Government he finally retired from
business with a large fortune. Early accustomed
to misery and privation, and the
spectator of misery and privation in others, he had
always been charitable according to his means;
but, from the period of his retirement to that
of his death, he devoted himself exclusively to
acts of munificence. From 1824 to 1852, his
memoirs may be summed up in saying that he
went about doing good. He made an honourable
provision for his family; the residue of
his fortune he held in trust for the poor, and
was a faithful steward. Clad in his little blue
mantle, he went about from house to house,
from street to street, from loathsome den to
loathsome den, down infected alleys, up rotten
staircases into foul garrets, feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, drying the tears of the
fatherless. He, the police, and the priests
were the repositories of the gigantic miseries
of Paris. In those severe winters, which, in
continental cities especially, produce appalling
misery, the figure of a man in a blue cloak
seemed to multiply itself indefinitely wherever
the snow clung to the black walls. There
appeared to be, not one but legions of little
blue mantles, trotting about (which was
strictly his mode of walking,) with prodigious
activity, bearing herculean loads of shoes,
worsted stockings, and great white jugs of soup,
as though they were feathers. I have heard,
from a source whose authenticity I have no
reason to doubt, that in one winter, in the one
city of Paris, he distributed with his own hands
fifteen thousand bowls of soup. The ragged
prowling wretches who ulcerate Paris would
wait patiently for hours on his track, and catching
sight of his well-known blue cloak in the
distance, would say, " Ah, here comes the little
blue mantle. We are going to get
something to eat! " Waistcoats and shoes were,
however, his specialities. A benumbed
wretch would be shivering in a gateway,
tightly embracing his bare chest with his
shrunken arms: Little Blue Mantle would
collar him fiercely; force him severely into a
warm woollen waistcoat; and, before the man
could thank him, Little Blue Mantle would be
a hundred yards away, brandishing his soup-
jugs. A little half-congealed atomy of a girl
would be crying on a door-step, her poor shoeless
feet quite violet with the pitiless cold:
incontinent she would be caught up from
behind, seated on a pair of friendly knees,
told half a merry story; and, a minute after,
left staggering in the unwonted luxury of a
whole pair of shoes.

I need not say that this man was adored
by the poor; that mothers brought their
children to him for a benediction, as to a
priest; that in the awful habitations
he almost alone ventured into, thieves and
murderers would have rent each other in
pieces before they would have suffered a
hair of his head to be touched. I have
conversed with a gentleman who assured me that,
on one occasion, a great hulking savage giant
of a horse-slaughterer, the terror even of his
savage quarter, fell on his knees before him
and exclaimed (with perfect French bombast),
but with perfect sincerity, " And is it possible
that such a man can walk on earth?'' He
expected to see full-fledged wings sprout from
the Little Blue Mantle.

Yet I find it nowhere on record that
M. Edmé Champion was vain or self-sufficient,
or insolent. He was the pioneer, the
interpreter, and the coadjutor of the priest. His
charity ever went hand in hand with religion,
and was its meet and willing helpmate.

Paris was his great working field; he
loved to struggle with great miseries; but he
never neglected nor forgot his native place.
He was ever about some of the improvements
I have mentioned in the commencement of
this paper; no tale of misery from Castel-
Censoir ever found his ear deaf or inattentive.
In the winter of 1829-30, one of almost
unexampled severity, he says, in a letter to
the Mayor of Castel-Censoir: " . . . As
the severity of the winter seems to be on the
increase, be good enough to distribute,
Monsieur, as they are needed, coals, fuel,
shoes, blankets, and such like: " and he goes
on to indicate the bakers, drapers, &c., to be
dealt with, and the agents to be drawn upon
for funds. He frequently visited his beloved
birthplace; where he was, neither more nor
less the counterpart of Pope's "Man of Ross;"
and, during one of these visits, he underwent a
very severe grief. A plantation, his property,
was destroyed by fire, and rumour whispered
that the conflagration was the work of an
incendiary. Edmé Champion struggled long
and direfully against the doleful suspicion;
but, one day, two peasants presented
themselves before him, and intimated that they
were the sole depositories of the secret of the
destruction of his trees. Refusing to hear
another word of this dreadful confidence, Little
Blue Mantle dragged them into the village
church, and made them swear, before the altar,
that they would lock the secret, if any existed,
in their own breasts, and never reveal it, save
under seal of confession on their death-beds.
Then he dismissed them with a present of
money.

Little Blue Mantle took frequent flying
visits of charity into other parts of France—
short pleasure trips of beneficence. These
were so numerous, and the good man took
them so much as a matter of course, that few
can be known but of the immediate circle of
the parties concerned. It is related, however,
that on one occasion he was informed of the
residence in a small village of an old lady, of
noble birth, who had lost all her relations by
the guillotine; and who, converting her few
jewels into ready money, had retired to an