smiled, and looked forth from the gallery, and smiled again—though still no carriage came.
It was, as I suspect, these young hopes and smiles which saved us from final disappointment: for the young men belonging to the cortége, suddenly rousing themselves from their state of listless watching, declared with one voice and one spirit, that les demoiselles should not be disappointed; and exchanging consignes which were to regulate the number and species of vehicles each was to seek—and find, too, on peril of his reputation,—they darted forth from the gallery, leaving us with renewed spirits and courage to bear all the curious glances bestowed upon us.
Our half-dozen aides-de-camp returned triumphantly in a few minutes, each one in his delta or his citadine; and the Galerie Delorme was soon left far behind us.
It is lucky for you that we had not to make a "voyage par mer" and "retour par terre," or my story might be as long—if resembling it in no other way—as the immortal expedition to St. Cloud. I shall not make a volume of it; but I must tell you that we halted at St. Denis.
The church is beautiful—a perfect bijou of true Gothic architecture—light, lofty, elegant; and we saw it, too, in a manner peculiarly advantageous, for it had neither organ, altar, nor screen to distract the eye from the great and simple beauty of the original design. The repairs going on here are of a right royal character—on a noble scale and in excellent taste. Several monuments restored from the collection made under the Empire aux Petits Augustins are now again the glory of St. Denis; and some of them have still much remaining which may entitle them to rank as very pure and perfect specimens of highly-antiquated monumental sculpture. But the chiselled treasures of a thousand years' standing cannot be made to travel about like the scenery of strolling players, in conformity to the will and whim of the successive actors who play the part of king, without great injury. In some instances the original nooks in this venerable mausoleum of royal bones have again received the effigies originally carved to repose within them; but the regal image has rarely been replaced without showing itself in some degree way-worn. In other cases, the monumental portrait, venerable and almost hallowed by its high antiquity, is made to recline on a whitened sepulchre as bright as Parisian masonry can make it.
Having fully examined the church and its medley of old and new treasures, we called a council as to the possibility of finding time for descending to the crypts: but most of the party agreeing in opinion that we ought not to lose the opportunity of visiting what a wit amongst us happily enough designated "le Palais Royal de la Mort," we ordered the iron gates to be unbarred for us, and proceeded with some solemnity of feeling into the pompous tomb. And here the unfortunate result of that bold spirit of change which holds nothing sacred is still more disagreeably obvious than in the church. All the royal monuments of France that could be collected are assembled in this magnificent vault, but with such incongruity of dates belonging to different parts of the same structure, as almost wholly to destroy the imposing effect of this gorgeous grave.
But if the spectator would seek farther than his eye can carry him, and inquire where the mortal relics of each sculptured monarch lie, the answer he will receive must make him believe that the royal dust of France has been scattered to the four winds of heaven. Nothing I have heard has sounded more strangely to me than the naïveté with which our guide informed us that, among all this multitude of regal tombs, there was not one which contained a single vestige of the mortal remains of those they commemorate.
For the love of good taste and consistency, these guardians of the royal sepulchre of France should be taught a more poetical lesson. It is inconceivable how, as he spoke, the solemn memorials of the illustrious dead, near which my foot had passed cautiously and my voice been mute, seemed suddenly converted into something little more sacred than the show furnishing of a stone-mason's shop. The bathos was perfect.
I could not but remember with a feeling of national pride the contrast to this presented by Westminster Abbey and St. George's Chapel. The monuments of these two royal fanes form a series as interesting in the history of art as of our royal line, and no painful consciousness of desecration mixes itself with the solemn reverence with which we contemplate the honoured tombs.
The most interesting object in the crypts of St. Denis, and which comes upon the moral feeling with a force increased rather than diminished by the incongruities which surround it, is the door of the vault prepared by Napoleon for himself. It is inscribed,