We found that the mummies lived in a place apart from the church, under the clocher, as the beautiful spire is called, by which we had steered our way, and we approached with feelings of unmitigated awe and creepiness the doorway to which we had been directed by two little boys who were playing cards in the shadow of a buttress. The door itself was round another buttress, in a low and crumbling stone archway, and we knocked timidly at it. It opened, and in a room of about the size and shape of a bonnet-box we beheld, instead of mummies, a cheerful family party at breakfast. We were about to retire, but the mother, wiping the vin ordinaire from her jovial mouth, assured us that she was ready to show us the Cellar of the Mummies immediately. We squeezed past the rest of the family, and saw that at their very feet a precipitous stone staircase plunged into darkness.
Our guide picked up a candlestick of a pattern that we were destined to see more of afterwards,—i.e. a long piece of wood with a tallow bougie erect at one end of it,—and after an anxious inquiry on our parts as to whether there was any scent là-bas in the cave had been answered in the negative, we followed her into the abyss. It proved to be a circular vault, made, like everything else in Bordeaux, of dusty yellow stone, and, after a minute of despondency on the part of the bougie, we saw, lining its walls, a dismal array of little brown figures, propped on end behind a low wooden rail.
The guide advanced with alacrity to her task.
‘Behold, mesdames, the celebrated mummies of St. Michel’—
She paused, and flourished the candle in the awful faces of a group of objects who were just preserved from being skeletons by a ragged covering of dusty leather which had once been flesh.
‘BEHOLD, MESDAMES, THE CELEBRATED MUMMIES OF ST. MICHEL.’
‘Voiçi la famille empoisonnée! Observe the morsel still in the mouth of the little one! Mosh-rhume! Hein?’ She made a light-hearted attempt at the English word, but seeing we looked bewildered, passed easily back into French. ‘Mushrooms, mesdames. All the family are found dead together!’
We looked at them, but not too closely, and also at their companions—the porter, the fat woman (now a shrivelled and dreadful dwarf), the boy who had been buried alive,—at least, the guide hopefully said that she was almost sure that he had been buried alive,—and the General, evidently a special favourite, who had been frequently wounded in the battle, so she told us, as an apology for the fact that there was very little of him left. How she knew these gruesome histories we did not inquire, and with the best intentions in the world we could not altogether believe them. There was nothing human or appealing in these grotesque survivals of three centuries ago; they might have been little damaged terra-cotta figures, had it not been for the dusty grins that showed unmistakable teeth, and some indefinable sentiment of genuineness and absence of effort.