Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

However, the bourreau became for a time an influential and admired personage. He was sometimes invited to dine at distinguished tables, and embraced as a favourite guest. Ultimately he figured as an autobiographer. The last of the Sansons wrote his own memoirs, together with those of his ancestors, executioners like himself. By no means the least curious fact in the history of the bourreau is that, in former days, he killed with one hand and healed with the other. He was a physician, that is to say; and at his dispensary, in the intervals between his murderous operations, he dealt out medicines to poor people who flocked to him for advice. By far the most famous of these medical bourreaux was Victor of Nîmes. His scientific reputation spread even beyond the boundaries of France. One day an Englishman called upon him for a consultation. This patient had a twisted neck, and had come over to place himself under the treatment of the once-famous school of Montpelier. After having endured all sorts of experiments, he found that his head showed no sign of resuming its normal position, and therefore, wishing his tormentors good day, he went on to Victor. “Can you cure me?” he inquired. The executioner examined him, and then said: “It is a simple case of torticolis. Nothing is easier than to cure you if you will confide in me, and do whatever I command.” The Englishman consented; and after certain preliminaries both surgeon and patient passed from the consulting-room into a more retired apartment. That Victor, besides being a surgeon, was a humorist, seems beyond question. The room now entered was remarkable for nothing in particular—with one exception, namely, that from the ceiling hung a rope, at the end of which was a noose. The doctor ordered his patient to put his head in this noose. For a long time the Englishman hesitated and protested; ultimately he obeyed. Then Victor tightened the noose, hoisted his subject high up in the air, and, using the victim’s legs as a kind of trapeze, went through the most frightful gymnastic exercises. At the end of a quarter of an hour—a mauvais quart d’heure for our countryman—the performance concluded, and the patient was let down—cured.{333}

CHAPTER XXXI.
PÈRE-LACHAISE.

The Cemeteries of Clamart and Picpus—Père-Lachaise—La Villette and Chaumont—The Conservatoire—Rue Laffitte—The Rothschilds—Montmartre—Clichy.

BEFORE crossing the river to the left bank, we must say a few words about some of those districts of Paris which are reached naturally, and as a matter of course, by the great thoroughfares; the ancient estate, for instance, of Mont-Louis, where, for the last two centuries, has been established the cemetery known as Père-Lachaise.

The cemeteries of Paris may be distinguished locally, or by the special character belonging to several of them. Each important district has its own cemetery: that of Montmartre, for instance, on the north, that of Mont-Parnasse on the south of Paris. The cemetery of Clamart was reserved, until the Revolution, for the bodies, dissected or undissected, of those who had died in hospital. It is now the last resting-place of criminals who have passed beneath the guillotine. The Picpus cemetery, at present a more or less private cemetery in which only privileged persons are buried, was formerly a place of interment for those who had distinguished themselves in insurrections and civil wars. There reposes La Fayette in the earth of the locality mingled with earth sent from America, in memory of the important part played by La Fayette in the American War of Independence.

Père-Lachaise, the most celebrated and most interesting of all the cemeteries, owes its name to the famous confessor of Louis XIV., who proposed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—the edict which accorded a certain toleration to the Protestants of France—and who celebrated the secret marriage of Louis XIV. to Mme. de Maintenon. Father Lachaise was a Jesuit with whom the idea of toleration could find no favour. The Duke de Saint-Simon, in his famous memoirs, gives a very favourable account of him, and while describing him as a “strong Jesuit,” adds that he was “neither fanatical nor fawning.” Although he advised the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes, he was no party to the active persecution by which the revocation was followed.{334}

The burial-ground of Père-Lachaise occupies the ancient domain of Mont-Louis, a property given to Father Lachaise by the king, and which in time became known exclusively by the name of its owner. It is for the most part an aristocratic cemetery. Although it contains monuments characterised by a solemnity befitting the idea of eternity, it is by no means the depressing, melancholy, awe-inspiring place which one might expect so vast a necropolis to be. On the one side wealth lies buried, on the other indigence. In juxtaposition to magnificent monuments, shaded with shrubs and graced with flowers, is the common trench, formed by two immense dikes dug in a sterile soil, where the poor sleep their last. There nothing but cold and dreary solitude meets the eye; whilst a few paces off stand Gothic chapels, sarcophagi, pyramids, obelisks, and artistic emblems of every kind—objects expressive, for the most part, of posthumous pride. Here social distinctions are marked with an ostentation painful to see: titles, coats of arms, escutcheons appearing in the marble or the stone. As to the inscriptions, these, written in a variety of styles—now pompous, now epigrammatic, now melodramatic—are frequently fantastic and seldom appropriate. Common to all the epitaphs, however widely they differ in other respects, is the uniform virtue which they ascribe to their subjects. In this connection a few words from the caustic pen of M. Benjamin Gastineau deserve reproduction. “At Père-Lachaise,” he says, “you find nothing but good fathers, good mothers, good brothers, good husbands, faithful wives, true friends, noble hearts, angels flown to heaven, white flowers, chaste spouses, seraphim of perfection. Not a traitor, not a coward, not a hypocrite, not a knave, not an egotist!”

The tombs of Père-Lachaise are frequently remarkable, not merely as fine specimens—or even masterpieces—of sculptural art, but on account of the illustrious personages who slumber beneath them. The magnificent tomb of Héloise and Abailard would justify a page of description, whilst the story of their romantic love sufficed, as we know, to inspire even the frigid pen of Alexander Pope with passion. From this ancient tomb a few steps will take the visitor into the company of the illustrious dead of a later day. Here is the monument of Frederick Soulié, the vehement and impassioned novelist—a simple marble slab, surmounted by a cross, and eloquently inscribed with his mere name. The tomb of the composer Chopin is not far off. In the front appears a medallion portrait of this brilliant genius, whilst, on the tomb itself, Cleslinger has sculptured a poetic figure, breaking the lyre he bears, and in an attitude of profound despair. Hard by is the tomb of Vivant Denon. Upon it his statue, by Cartelier, stands, still smiling with that smile which, as a French historian has ingeniously said, “pleased, turn by turn, Louis XV., Mme. de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XVI., Robespierre, and Napoleon.”