“’The girls admitted are usually wretchedly clad; on their entrance, they receive a full suit of clothes.  Almost all are pale, thin, weak children, to whom melancholy and suffering have imparted an old and careworn expression.  But, thanks to cleanliness, to wholesome and sufficient food, to a calm and well-regulated life, to the pure, healthy air they breathe, the natural hues and the joyousness of youth soon reanimate the little faces; and with lithe, invigorated limbs, and happy hearts, these young creatures join merrily in the games of their new companions.  They have entered the institution old; they will leave it young.’

“The Empress Eugenie delights in visiting the institution of the Faubourg St. Antoine.  This is natural.  Her Majesty cannot but feel pleasure in the contemplation of all she has accomplished by sacrificing a magnificent, but idle ornament to the welfare of so many beings rescued from misery and ignorance.  These four hundred young girls will be so many animated, happy, and grateful jewels, constituting for Her Majesty in the present, and for her memory in the future, an ever new set of jewels, an immortal ornament, a truly celestial talisman.

“A fresco painting represents, in a hemicycle, the Empress in her bridal dress, offering to the Virgin a diamond necklace; young girls are kneeling around her in prayer; admiration and fervent faith are depicted on their brows.”

A very large amount of the world’s capital is represented in precious stones, and ninety per cent of that capital so invested is in diamonds.  This was not always the case.  Ancient millionnaires held their enormous jewelry-riches more in colored stones than is the custom now.  Crystallized carbon has risen in the estimation of capitalists, and crystallized clay has gone down in the scale of value.  If the diamond be the hardest known substance in the world’s jewel-box, the pearl is by no means its near relation in that particular.  The daughters of Stilicho slept undisturbed eleven hundred and eighteen years, with all their riches in sound condition, except the pearls that were found with their splendid ornaments.  The other decorations sparkled in the light as brilliantly as ever; but the pearls crumbled into dust, as their owners had done centuries before.  Eight hundred years before these ladies lived and wore pearls, a queen with “swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes” tried a beverage which cost, exclusive of the vinegar which partly composed it, the handsome little sum of something over eighty thousand pounds.  Diamond and vinegar would not have mixed so prettily.