Who would have thought that th new Paris street traffic regulations were destined to provide an object~ Tesson in the vanity of fame? The shopkeepers round about the Plac de la Madeleine objected so strong} to the creation of a motor-parky which they considered certain obstruct their premises and affect their business, that the Prefect of Police was obliged to look round for more room, He saw that valu~ able space was occupied by n tiny plot of garden in the middle of {which was a monument. to Jules Simon, the philosopher and statesman who died in 1896, and it seem= fed to him that the only practical course was to clear the garden and the monument a and yesterday fred off by a crane Jand carted away, leaving the empty pedestal to remind passers-by that the past cannot be allowed to hamper the necessities of the present and future, Poors Jules Simon! Thirty y have sufficed to exhaust his fon posterity, and yet he was con~ sidered a vather remarkable man in his day! Of course his admirers ought to have been satisfied with mere bust in a niche on.a wall.
They never imagined that the next generation would be so disrespect~ ful towards a bronze statue of a great man in a frock coat and trousers. On the other side of the Rue Royale is another tiny garden with fa statue of Victorien Sardou the dramatist, embowered in greenery. Hi fame is wider and of a later than Jules Simon's, but even is to be sacrificed for the same reason. To console the relatives, it announced that the statues will he re-erected elsewhere. Perhaps.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.