“I always think,” said the dentist’s mother, smiling still more broadly, “that it is a great advantage to be opposite the Necropolis.”
Poor innocent as I was, and country bred, I had no idea of the meaning of the word.
I was soon to discover. Funerals are of more than daily occurrence in a mighty city. Oh! the processions that I stared down upon from the drawing-room window, through the fog and the rain—gloom generally enveloped that centre of manufactures! I was left long hours alone; no one but an impertinent French maid with whom I could exchange my ideas. The proceedings in the Necropolis had a hypnotic attraction for me. I began to feel quite certain that it was gaping for my poor little bones, and that they must inevitably rest there. Finally, I extracted a solemn oath that, whatever happened, this should not be the case—a promise momentarily soothing, but far from lifting the weight of depression that pressed upon me.
To add a touch of revolting comedy to my experiences, the owner of the house returned abruptly from his holiday and took possession of the locked-up room for an afternoon, for the purpose of extracting all the teeth of a special friend. I fled from the house in terror, when Elise ‹who hated me› informed me with much gusto of the impending excitement. Needless to say, however, she regaled me with every groan on my return, and all the details she had been able to pick up from the parlourmaid—left by the dentist, en parenthèse—who had counted the teeth.
The nightmare shrinking from death and its dreadful appanages is one that is mercifully passing from me. But I envy those who can take the great tragic facts of existence, not only with simplicity, but with a kind of enjoyable interest.
A Hungarian friend of ours derived much solace in the loss of an adored mother by the choosing of a coffin—“Louis XV, with little Watteau bows of ormolu.” She smiled with real joy, through her tears as she described the casket to us, adding:
“And I have chosen just such another for myself for ven I die!”
She stared in amazement when I remarked that I should not care what my coffin was like.
“Vat?” she exclaimed, “not like to be buried in a Vatteau coffin? But it is so pretty!”
Alas! she lies in her pretty coffin, and our world is much the poorer. But we are sure that during the long months of her last illness, when she shut herself away from every one in the solitude of her great Hungarian property, to face death alone, the thought of those Watteau bows was a distinct satisfaction.