They still have him, or what is left of him, in that glass case. He
did not exactly suffer martyrdom--though probably he personally did
not notice any very great difference--and so he has not been canonized;
nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In all Europe I only
saw one sight to match him, and that was down in the crypt under the
Church of the Capuchins, in Rome, where the dissected cadavers of four
thousand dead--but not gone--monks are worked up into decorations. There
are altars made of their skulls, and chandeliers made of their thigh
bones; frescoes of their spines; mosaics of their teeth and dried
muscles; cozy corners of their femurs and pelves and tibiae. There are
two classes of travelers I would strongly advise not to visit the crypt
of the Capuchins' Church--those who are just about to have dinner and
want to have it, and those who have just had dinner and want to keep on
having it.
At the royal palace in Vienna we saw the finest, largest, and gaudiest
collection of crown jewels extant. That guide of ours seemed to think he
had done his whole duty toward us and could call it a day and knock
off when he led us up to the jewel collections, where each case was
surrounded by pop-eyed American tourists taking on flesh at the sight of
all those sparklers and figuring up the grand total of their valuation
in dollars, on the basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many
hundred dollars a carat, until reason tottered on her throne--and did
not have so very far to totter, either.
The display or all those gems, however, did not especially excite me.
There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue Kimberley
in a hotel clerk's shirtfront or a pigeonblood ruby on a faro dealer's
little finger might hold my attention and win my admiration; but where
jewels are piled up in heaps like anthracite in a coal bin they thrill
me no more than the anthracite would. A quart measure of diamonds of the
average size of a big hailstone does not make me think of diamonds but
of hailstones. I could remain as calm in their presence as I should in
the presence of a quart of cracked ice; in fact, calmer than I should
remain in the presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where
there is not that much ice, cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucketful
of ice would be worth traveling miles to see. You could sell tickets for
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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