Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/25

Rh the damage. Thorwaldsen's Copernicus, which is so popular in Warsaw that the common people call a statue a Copernicus, is covered with dirt, but is never cleaned. The pedestal is crumbling away under it, but no one restores it. The Copernicus is one of the oldest statues of the city. It was completed and unveiled May 11, 1830, after the distinguished author Stanislaw Staszic (1755-1826), the first great orator of the Polish democracy, who gave all that he possessed to objects for the public good, had made a contribution of 70,000 Polish florins to the national subscription for the erection of the memorial. On the other hand, the monument to Prince Joseph Poniatowski which Thorwaldsen had undertaken during his stay in Warsaw, September-October, 1820, and which in 1829 arrived in the city to be cast in bronze, was indeed unveiled the same day as the Copernicus, but was removed, as soon as the revolt of 1831 was quenched in blood. It is now to be found rebaptized as a St. George, and inaccessible, in the grounds of a Russian private citizen, the Prince of Warsaw, not far from the city.

The only public memorials in good condition are: the colossal monument to Paskiewicz in the middle of the main street of the Cracow Suburb (Krakowskie Przedmiescie), erected in gratitude because he, "trusty and active as the knout in the hands of the executioner" (Mickiewicz) in September, 1831, when the last heroic defenders had blown themselves up into the air, conquered the redoubts before Warsaw and entered the city—and the great iron obelisk, commemorating the names of the Poles, who, in 1831, informed against their countrymen, and were hanged or shot on that account as traitors or spies. On the sumptuous granite pedestal rest four metal lions. About the base of the obelisk are horrible-looking heraldic eagles with two heads of supernatural size. The inscription in Russian and Polish over the names reads thus: "The Poles who fell for fidelity to their Sovereign." This obelisk very possibly misses its mark in Warsaw!

The street traffic is by no means inconsiderable; in the markets there is the same life as everywhere else where