Over the Days

Bird Paradise.

Since its decommissioning as a fortress, the island of Heligoland, once English, now German, has become what it once was: a vast resting place for migratory birds that pass through these parts. And God knows how many pass through, year in and year out! Sometimes, it is larks that swoop down there by the hundreds of thousands, or even these golden-crested wrens whose winged phalanges that follow one another for several days are so numerous that the sky is as if darkened when they resume their flight en masse.

In the North Sea, the Farne archipelago is also visited by prodigious quantities of birds. Unscrupulous hunters made hecatombs of them. Some thought was given to protecting their innocent victims. From now on, for the feathered people, these islands are like so many Edens. No need to start it again! It grows and multiplies there in all tranquility. Happy birds! Where, in what earthly paradise, will we poor humans ever taste the joys of such security and such peace?

Too talkative.
THE OLD LADY. - It's been two years since you sold me this parrot. Now, I've never heard him utter a word.
THE MERCHANT. - I'm not surprised. He's too well-bred to interrupt you.

To recognize his route. -
Soon no one will risk getting lost in the vast Canadian plains of the State of Ontario. The roads are numbered there, and there is talk of engraving the number not only on signposts, but also on every telegraph pole. It's as easy as pie. It was still necessary to think of it, and would Little Thumb have found anything better?

The first ring.
If we are to believe a very old fable, this is where the use of the most familiar of jewels comes from. And first a little mythology.

You know as well as I do, dear reader, this myth of Prometheus forming the first men with the help of earth and water, then, to animate them, climbing the sky in order to steal a spark of divine fire. As if, irritated by such audacity, Jupiter struck down the imprudent man, then chained him to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle came to feast on his liver. And as if Hercules put an end to the torture of Prometheus, whom he freed, even if it meant imploring Jupiter's clemency afterwards.

Now, Jupiter found himself in a quandary, wanting to forgive, but unable to do so without perjuring himself, since he had sworn that this torture would be eternal. Fortunately, the gods are never short of expedients. Jupiter got around the difficulty by imposing the following condition: from now on, Prometheus would always wear, on one of the fingers of his right hand, an iron ring, symbol of his chain, and in which would be embedded a pebble, symbol of the rock where he had been tortured. This was the first ring. The iron ring subsequently had only to change into a gold ring on the woman's finger, and the pebble into a precious stone.

Riddles.
What is the most proud animal?
My tongue to the cat.
It's the giraffe.
Why is that?
Because no one else looks down on things and people from so high.

How Paris used to be lit.
The City of Light has not always been like this. Public lighting there dates back to 1667. That year, his police lieutenant, La Reynie, had 5,000 lanterns installed there, which were only lit in winter, from the last quarter of the moon in September to the first moon in April.

In 1745, the lanterns were replaced by street lamps, which themselves gave way to gas lamps in 1818. But before that? you might say. My God, let's make a distinction.

In the Middle Ages, when a bourgeois of the city ventured out of his home after dark, he did like those gentlemen who were preceded by torchbearers. There was indeed, in 1524, a special ordinance, ordering Parisians to place a lantern on the first floor of their houses and to keep it lit after nine o'clock in the evening. This ordinance was never applied.

In 1558, Parliament was moved. Orders were given to place a lantern at the ends of each street and another in the middle of the longest ones. A little later, there would even be a corps of lantern-bearers! Fixed lanterns were better. This is what La Reynie understood. Thanks be to him!

Ice Suns.
If the stars are incandescent bodies, such is their distance from our humble planet that the nearest of them sends it less heat than a candle burning twenty leagues from your home could provide you. Astronomers, who are intrepid mathematicians, calculate that this tiny quantity of heat, multiplied a thousand billion times, would be just enough to boil a pint of water! Suffice to say that the earth cannot count on these ice suns to resist the deadly cold that would petrify it, if the star of the day were to go out.

CLÉGUER.