“The 17th of October, 1793, M. Hourelle, then municipal officer and first warden of the parish of Saint-Remi, came to me and notified me, from the representative of the people, Ruhl, of the order to remit the reliquary containing the holy ampulla, to be broken.  We resolved, M. Hourelle and I, since we could do no better, to take from the holy ampulla the greater part of the balm contained in it.  We went to the Church of Saint-Remi; I withdrew the reliquary from the tomb of the saint, and bore it to the sacristy, where I opened it with the aid of small iron pincers.  I found placed in the stomach of a dove of gold and gilded silver, covered with white enamel, having the beak and claws in red, the wings spread, a little phial of glass of reddish color about an inch and a half high corked with a piece of crimson damask.  I examined this phial attentively in the light, and I perceived a great number of marks of a needle on the sides; then I took from a crimson velvet bag, embroidered with fleurs-de-lis in gold, the needle used at the time of the consecration of our kings, to extract the particles of balm, dried and clinging to the glass.  I detached as many as possible, of which I took the larger part, and remitted the smaller to M. Hourelle.”

The particles thus preserved were given into the hands of the Archbishop of Rheims, who gathered them in a new reliquary.

Sunday, the 22d of May, 1825, the day of the feast of the Pentecost, the Archbishop of Rheims assembled in a chapel of that city the metropolitan clergy, the principal authorities, and the persons who had contributed to the preservation of the particles of the precious relic, in order to proceed, in their presence, to the transfusion of those particles into the holy chrism, to be enclosed in a new phial.  A circumtantial report of this ceremony was prepared in duplicate.

“Thus,” said the Moniteur, May 26, “there remains no doubt that the holy oil that will flow on the forehead of Charles X. in the solemnity of his consecration, is the same as that which, since Clovis, has consecrated the French monarchs.”

The day of the consecration approached.  The Mayor of Rheims, M. Ruinard de Brimont, had not a moment’s rest.  At the consecration of Louis XV., about four hundred lodgings had been marked with chalk.  For that of Charles X. there were sixteen hundred, and those who placed them at the service of the administration asked no compensation.  The 19th of May was begun the placing of the exterior decorations on the wooden porch erected in front of the door of the basilica.  It harmonized so completely with the plan of the edifice that “at thirty toises,” it seemed a part of the edifice.  The centrings and the interior portieres of this porch presented to the view a canopy sown with fleurs-de-lis in the midst of which stood out the royal cipher and the crown of France, modelled in antique fashion.  These decorations were continued from the portal along the beautiful gallery that led