The Delta Independent

The Tomb of Richelieu.

Last Resting Place of the Great Cardinal in the Magnificent Sorbonne.

Although a stern edict has gone forth to no longer bottle up the new wine of science and letters in the old receptacles of Richelieu, even official iconoclasts have spared the familiar dome which covers the great cardinal's tomb. The new Sorbonne, however elaborate, would hardly be the Sorbonne at all without Richelieu's splendid chapel as its heart. Students and professors no longer have to bow before the altar, and no Sorbonne doctors fill the pulpit; but who so chooses can enter, and either find a service or at least view the beautiful sarcophagus beneath which lies the dust of the great Armand Jean du Plessis himself, in the midst of the institution he builded anew, lavishing the millions of his private fortune thereon, and even mortgaging the estate of his heirs. Above the tomb has in recent years been suspended his carefully preserved cardinal's hat, while the head itself, savagely severed when the tomb was violated in 1793, has also been miraculously recovered and replaced on the embalmed remains. Even the tomb itself was carted away and kept for many years at the museum.--Edmund R. Spearman in Scribner's.