Largest Statue

Along the poplar-flickering roads south of Paris last week rolled two camions each bearing an enormous head. They were bound for the little village of Le Mas-Rillier, which has sunned itself for 2,000 years on a mountain top near Lyons, overlooking the Rhone Valley. The heads were those of a Virgin and Child. Joined to concrete bodies, they will complete the largest statue in the world.

Notre Dame de Sacre Coeur was designed in simple, flowing lines by Georges Serraz of Paris, a grey little man who is considered France's finest religious artist. Cost of his colossus was 1,000,000 francs, raised during the past two years by the energetic cure of Le Mas-Rillier. Holding the child high in her arms and gazing down, the Virgin of Le Mas-Rillier will face south over 100 miles of the French Alps. Her weight: 440 tons. Her height with foundation: 174 feet.*

*Other heights: Statue of Liberty, 151 feet; Christ the Redeemer (on Mt. Corcovado near Rio de Janeiro), 130 feet. Projected: San Francisco's St. Francis, 180 feet; Lenin (atop the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow), about 328 feet.

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