He receives me in the same white room, where valises and travelling-bags are lying about on the furniture. The bishop leaves to-morrow for Europe, which he has not seen for twelve years. He is going to Rome to see the Pope, and then to France, to raise money for his suffering missions. His great work of over forty years is annihilated, fifteen thousand of his Christian converts massacred; his churches, chapels, hospitals, schools, are all destroyed, razed to the ground; his cemeteries have been violated, and yet, discouraged at nothing, he wishes to begin all over again. As he conducts me across his garden I admire the beautiful energy with which he says, pointing to the damaged cathedral with its broken cross, which is the only building left standing, gloomily outlined against the evening sky: "I will rebuild, larger and higher, all the churches they have thrown down, and I hope that each movement of violence and hatred against us may carry Christianity one step further on in their country. Possibly they will again destroy my churches; who knows? If so, I will build them up again, and we shall see whether they or I will be the first to weary of it." He seems very great to me in his determination and in his faith, and I understand that China must reckon with this apostle of the vanguard. XII SATURDAY, October 27. I wanted to see the Violet City and its throne rooms once more before going away, and to enter it this time, not by round-about ways and back doors and secret posterns, but by the great avenues and gates that have been for centuries closed, so that I might try to imagine beneath the destruction of to-day what must have been in former times the splendor of the sovereigns' arrival. No one of our European capitals has been conceived and laid out with such unity and audacity, with the idea of increasing the magnificence of a pageant always dominant, especially that of imparting an imposing effect to the appearance of the Emperor. The throne is here the central idea. This city, as regular as a geometrical figure, seems to have been created solely to enclose and glorify the throne of the Son of Heaven, ruler of four hundred millions of souls; to be its peristyle, to lead up to it by colossal avenues which recall Thebes or Babylon. It is easy to understand why the Chinese ambassadors, who came to visit our kings in the times when their immense country was flourishing, were not particularly dazzled by the sight of the Paris of those days, of the Louvre or of Versailles.