Leather Lane, the quaint by-street, which runs along the side of Gam. age's, Holborn, -has held its last] Sunday street market, following the ban placed on Sunday street trading by the Holborn Council. This Sunday market for generations has ly been a feature of London life. It served primarily the Italian population in Clerkenwell, and of latter years has been much patronised by the wives of barristers, journalists, and Bolemians living in the Blooms bury distriet.In Leather Lane one could buy practically everything. death in Paris, Voltaire's body wa brought to Scelligres by his nephew, the ubbé Mignot who, being a priest, thought it was essential that} his too-celebrated uncle should have]
Christian burial. For this purpose a pious fraud was organised, The body of a lay-brother, who conveniently happened to die about that] time, was put into Voltaire's coffin, while Voltaire himself was buried in the lime. The monks of the abbey) who knew the secret, of course, had no objection in performing the Inst] rites of the Church over the remains of their departed lay-brother, and in this way the Church had the posthumous satisfaction of saying' the last word over the corpse of the most notorious unbeliever of his When the republican deputation came to Scelligres in 1791, with instructions to remove Voltaire's coffin ind take it to the Pantheon, they turally were not informed by the monks of the substitution that had taken place, and consequently the delegates unsuspectingly went off with the coffin containing the remains of a humble monastic garden. er. This story is related in several records of the time; for instance, a letter from Prince Bariatinsky, then Russian Ambassador to France, to the Empress Catherine I. It also is recorded in a report signed by one Sourdat, who was police lieutenant for the Troyes. district It is so remarkable a story that one wonders why the ardent republicans of the period did not verify it before, paying national honours to Voltaire atthe Pantheon, Perhaps they were in too great a hurry, and perhaps they did not believe it, 'A leading French anthropologist thinks the only way to settle the point is to examine the two skulls. It is known that Voltaire's brain and heart were removed immediately after his death, and as it would be impossible to take away a brain without cutting through the skull, the marks of this operation still would be visible. One of the persons present at the opening.of the tomb in 1897 says the skull evidently. had been cut in two, and that the. mark of the saw was pointed out at the time by M, Berthelot, the great chemist, who handled the skull. Perhaps it will not be considered necessary to open the tomb a second time to make sure. In any ease, the incident shows how extremely dificult it is to make sure of any fact in history.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.