THE SCULPTOR’S CIGARS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3825, 23 October 1936, Page 8

THE SCULPTOR’S CIGARS

RECOVERY AFTER 90 YEARS. Wine undoubtedly improves with age, and when the four figures gracing the memorial “Austria” fountain V in the Freyung Square, in Vienna, come to be moved in the course of their renovation, now in progress, Austrians will learn, according to the “Oestep-eichische-Zeitung am Abend,” whether costly Havana cigars improve or deteriorate with 90 years of storage. The treasure, writes the Vienna correspondent of the London Times, represents smuggled goods. Wlhen the statues modelled by Herr Thomas von Schfanthaler, and cast in bronze in Munich, were ready for transport to Vienna, the sculptor, an ardent smoker who appreciated Havana cigars (they were imported into Bavaria almost duty free, whereas the Austrian tobacco monopoly hindered foreign importation almost completely), went to Munich and filled his statues with boxes of cigars before closing them up hermetically within sheeting. Unfortunately for him, the sculptor caught cold in the post chaise, between Munich and Vienna, and by the time he was well again the figures, firmly mounted and cemented, were surveying the Freyung Square. The Emperor Ferdinand himself honoured the unveiling ceremony in 1846, and Herr Schwanthaler mourned the loss of his cigars—so near, yet unattainable—to his dying day.