of the remains of one whom they had come to see as a martyr, felt betrayed that they had been unable to render him the homage that they had wished. Hence, the government began to fear rioting and took every possible measure to prevent the people from assembling. Accordingly, the cortège had been mostly riverborne and had spent little time in towns outside Paris. In Paris, only important personages were present at the ceremony. Worse, the lack of respect shown by most of the politicians shocked public opinion and revealed a rift between the people and their government. The "retour" also did not prevent France from losing its diplomatic war with the United Kingdom. France was forced to give up supporting its Egyptian ally. Thiers, losing his way in aggressive policies, was ridiculed, and the king was compelled to dismiss him even before Belle Poule arrived. Thiers had managed to push through the return of the remains but was unable to profit from that success. Monument In April 1840 the organized a competition in which 81 architects participated, whose projects were exhibited in the recently completed Palais des Beaux-Arts. After a protracted process, Louis Visconti was selected as project architect in 1842 and finalized his design around mid-1843. Visconti created a circular hollow beneath the dome, as a kind of open crypt. At its center is a massive sarcophagus which has often been described as made of red porphyry, including in the Encyclopædia Britannica as of mid-2021, but is actually a purple quartzite from a geological region known as Shoksha, near Lake Onega in Russian Karelia. The sarcophagus rests upon a base of green granite from the Vosges: These quarries were located in the Karelian region of the Finland which then belonged to the Russian Empire and were under the suzerainty of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia; the French ended up paying around 200,000 francs for the stones, borne by the French government. That green granite block rests, in turn, upon a slab of black marble, 5.5m x 1.2m x 0.65m, quarried at Sainte-Luce and transported to Paris with great difficulty. The monument took years to complete, not least because of the exceptional requirements for the stone to be used. The Russian quartzite, intended as an echo of the porphyry used for late Roman imperial burials, was quarried in 1848 upon Tsar Nicholas I's special permission by Italian engineer Giovanni