Certainly the _très chic chef_ of the Military Mission will be well punished for _his_ good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a _plaque de commissaire_ on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what know I besides? As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley, toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately, scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the Beautiful Girls.” And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate, yet its beauty left me cold. Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost in the shadow of Mont Blanc.