The Illustrious Unknown

Sadly the little man ran his eye over the cluttered warehouse yard. "The court," he sighed, waving a hand, "of the illustrious unknown." Foreign Ministry Official Sylva Poullin was knee-deep in statues: men of the Second Empire with pointed goatees and spiked mustaches, Third Republicans with voluptuous spade beards, poets, politicians, schoolteachers and generals, the Roman god Mars and France's own Marianne, her bronze face pushed in. Like many more famous works of art, they had been patiently salvaged from Germany after the war by France's conscientious Commission de Recuperation Artistique, brought back to Paris, and stored in an

Avenue Rapp warehouse to await the claim of their rightful owners. But now no one seemed to want them.

"One asks municipal authorities all over France to list carefully everything taken by the Germans," said M. Poullin, gently kicking a bearded philosopher at his feet. "But no one lists this statue. Someone is being very silent about this statue. One suspects that someone does not want this statue back on its pedestal." He sighed again. "The same goes for all these other messieurs" he continued. "No one wants them. Maybe 40 or even 50 years ago little children were called in from their classrooms to sing songs when these statues were unveiled. Perhaps M. le Prefet made a speech. Now no one can remember even the names. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity."

The official pointed to a general flat on his back before him. "This one," he said, "we thought we could identify. It says on the statue 'General Dupas.' But when we checked, it seemed that about 100 generals of the same name die each year. We never identified him." He gazed at the general, but the general offered no clue. Nearby a mustachioed captain of colonial infantry, stern devotion to duty written all over his young face, looked up at an overweight nude (see cut). As a statesman turned his frock-coated back, a nameless admiral, whose neck, broken in transit, gave him more the look of a fey midshipman, cast a come-hither glance at a Grecian faun.

"Camels," said the irritated M. Poullin suddenly, kicking aside a plaque that read LET us NEVER FORGET: 1914-1918, "you'd think that people would remember camels at least.

But we have a camel here that no one remembers, also a monument commemorating the first tunnel through the Alps."

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