264 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
to
make his escape, but unfortunately the ever-recurring instances of his
activity from the age of St. Enimie down to our own time preclude this
belief.
An
heirloom in the family of Dom Pedro of Brazil is said to have been
loaned to one of the pioneer aviators, Santos-Dumont, by Dom Pedro's
daughter, the Comtesse d'Eu. This was a medal of St. Benedict and had
been long regarded as a powerful talisman in the Braganza family. One
of its princely members had a striking proof of this virtue in 1705,
when, after having worn the medal but two weeks, he was saved from
deadly peril by the timely discovery and consequent defeat of a plot.
Santos-Dumont had just experienced a terrible fall while experimenting
with his new airship in the Rothschild park near Paris, and this it was
that induced the Comtesse d'Eu to loan him the talis-manic medal, with
the injunction that he should always wear it on his person, and the
assurance that if he did so no further harm could befall him. The
talisman seemed to do its work well, for although the aviator had many
narrow escapes, he was always saved from serious injury. Unfortunately,
however, a thief picked it from the pocket of his coat while he was
busily engaged in work on an airship in a Paris machine-shop.22
While
it was customary to close the shops of the goldsmiths on Sundays and
feast-days, a special exception permitted the "Confrérie de St. Eloi,"
the goldsmiths' guild, to open a single shop (not always the same one)
on each Sunday and feast-day, the profits of the sales being devoted to
providing a dinner on Easter Day for the poor of the Hôtel Dieu.23 This combination of commercialism and philanthropy has illustrations in our own day, and, whatever
"St. Louis Democrat, 1905.
" De Lespinasse, " Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris," Paris, 1892, p. 11.
