Four Years in France / or, Narrative of an English Family's Residence there during that Period; Preceded by some Account of the Conversion of the Author to the Catholic Faith

by Henry Digby Beste

Such is, by law, the mode of sepulture throughout France: no one can be buried in a church, nor even in his own garden or field, unless at a certain distance from all habitation; and cemeteries, regulated like that of Père la Chaise, are every where provided. These burying-grounds are to be restored to cultivation, wholly or in part, as the case may require, during the time necessary for the complete rotting of the bodies beneath; a space of fourteen years, says Hamlet's grave-digger, for "all but your tanner:" this however must depend more on the nature of the soil than on the former occupation of the persons deceased; but Shakspeare is allowed to jest on every subject.

I will own that the view of the great cemetery of the capital of France displeased, and even disgusted me; and that the law in regard to this matter appeared to me a scheme of irreligious legislators for putting out of sight all that might remind them of death, and for desecrating church-yards, and for rooting out of the minds of the people their veneration for ancient usages and consecrated places. An enclosure, destined to the uses of a church-yard, turned into a flower-garden,—or a flower-garden, still retaining its finery, turned into a church-yard;—monuments surmounted, not by the symbol of salvation, but by vases in which no ashes were contained, and which are absurd in a place where bodies are not burned, but buried;—inscriptions, which spoke not of eternity, but were such as if the person beneath had died without hope or fear,—all this offended me. The provisions of the law of burial, which does not allow families to repose together even in death, since each corpse must take its place in the row or line,—this law, which destroys all sepulchral memorials of families or individuals,—(for if the land be restored to cultivation the sepulchres cannot well be preserved,) all this shocked my habitual notions and ancient prejudices.

Yet what can be more dangerous to the health of a great city, than that, in every populous part of it, there should be a small enclosure, containing, at a little depth under ground, dead bodies in every stage of putrefaction,—a dunghill of most noxious exhalation, slightly covered with mould? How much is this danger increased by the contagious, (I was going to say pestilential, but it is now doubted whether pestilence be contagious or not,) by the contagious nature of many diseases! What can be more indecent, and at the same time dangerous, than that, at the digging of a grave, bodies should be disturbed before they are assimilated to the dust to which they are committed, and that skulls and other bones should be thrown out for play-things to thoughtless children? Such things I have seen, and so has every man who has been present at the digging of a grave in any town in England; such things are even represented on the stage, to the disgrace of our national character, for the sake of the grave-diggers' puns, and an ingenious moralizing on the skull of Yorick. Custom reconciles us to things in themselves most shocking. Medea might have slain her children coram populo, if the people had been used to it. They were used to gladiators.

Yet custom will not prevent infection: we ought, in spite of custom, to be sensible of the indecency of our mode of interment, and of the risk we run by heaping our dead on each other in a narrow boundary, yearly encroached upon by the altar-tombs of the wealthy, and rendered still narrower by a predilection, foolish as it may seem, for the sunny side of the church-yard. How then are the dead to be disposed of? a question to my mind more difficult to answer than "how are the dead raised up?"

In populous cities,—a situation unfavourable to human life,—of thirty persons, one dies yearly: each individual requires for his grave two square yards of earth; grown persons rather more, as every grave ought to be separated from that nearest to it; and children will require less than two square yards; but upon an average, a population of seventy-two thousand six hundred souls, or more properly on this occasion, bodies, will cover with their dead, in the space of one year, an acre of land. The dead of the city of Paris in fourteen years,—Shakspeare's period for entire decomposition,—would take up a hundred and forty acres. If cemeteries are not restored to cultivation, the dead, after a few generations, will starve the living; at least it must be borne in mind that cemeteries, near great towns, must be allotted in situations where land is most valuable. Unwillingly I abandon all my prepossessions in favour of holy ground and other "circumstance" of christian burial. The dead ought not to be carried into the church before interment: that practice is still allowed in France, but ought, for obvious reasons, to be suppressed: the coffin ought to have no lid or cover; thus the compression of the ascending vapour will be more complete, and the assimilation of the body to the surrounding mould will not be retarded: if the horrible accident of burying any one alive should unhappily occur, at the least, that which most aggravates the horror of such a misfortune,—the lingering torments of the interred,—are prevented: portions of land ought to be appropriated, in the neighbourhood of great cities, to the uses of sepulture and cultivation successively: lastly, the rich ought to be contented with cenotaphs and inscriptions to their memory on the walls and pavements of churches, while masses and other commemorations may be celebrated in the presence of catafalques.

The catacombs are, or is, (for I have forgotten my English grammar,) one of the lions of the environs of Paris; and such a lion! Let the word "lumen" mean "life," and call it "monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." When the Cimetière du Père la Chaise was substituted for church-yards, out of these latter, now to be applied to secular uses, were dug the human bones that were found in laying the foundations of buildings: these bones were carried to certain stone quarries, now no longer worked, a little to the south of Paris. So far, so good: but it came into the heads of the managers of this affair to make a pretty thing of it: on the sides of the passages of the quarry, and in the wider spaces, they ranged these bones in squares and circles, and wheels and stars; a skull in the middle, and rays of thighbones, brachia, and lacerti; of the ossa, ilium, ischium, and coccygis,—there was no os sacrum,—they made obelisks and pyramids; and this "region of horror,"—these "doleful shades,"—under the abused name of the catacombs, attract the idle and curious traveller to see by what fantastic devices that which is most respectable and venerable to humanity and to faith can be tricked out into raree-show. This place cannot be visited without inconvenience: it were to be wished, as in the case of the opera tune, that, instead of difficulty, there might be impossibility: it is excessively damp; moisture issues from above, though on the sides it is hidden by the choice tapestry with which they are decorated; but the ground is slippery; each person gropes along with a wax taper in his hand, sometimes obliged to curve himself. It is some consolation, at length, to find here an altar, on which, once in the year, on All Souls' Day, a missa pro defunctis is said. I trust in the good taste, if not in the piety of the French people, so far, as to hope that this altar will be set up in a chapel above-ground, and that the catacombs will be filled with earth, and closed till the consummation of all things.

The cimetière and the catacombs are, strictly speaking, in the environs of Paris, being without the walls. I made however with my sons several excursions to places in the neighbourhood, setting out in the morning, passing the day at the place of our visit, and returning in the cool of the evening. Mrs. ——, and my daughters, who had remained in England for the purpose of spending some time with her relations before quitting the country, arrived at Paris, under the conduct of one of her brothers, towards the middle of July,—in fact, as it happened, on the memorable fourteenth. I took an apartment for a month in the Rue Neuve des Mathurins, and during that month also we made excursions. I shall make a few observations on what I saw; and "first with the first," the pride of Louis XIV and of France, the deserted palace or château of Versailles.

It is rather a handsome and extensive building, than a monument to the glory of a great king and a great nation. The front toward Paris, composed in part of some corps-de-logis of the ancient hunting-seat of Louis XIII. is irregular, and this grande cour, (and a grand court it certainly is,) does not form a whole. The approach to the garden front is through a passage, and to take a view of this front one must first go away from it. At the edge of the terrace one does not see the wings, which recede, and form a line with the back of this part of the palace: below the steps of the terrace, the lower part of the building is hidden by the intervening ground. This inversion of the wings has not the effect of breaking the too great length of the building: it is said to have been the project of Napoleon to erect a magnificent colonnade or portico in front of that part which stands forward on the terrace; thus the wings, if such they may be called, would be thrown into the back ground: for this they are indeed too handsome; but in the back ground they have been placed by the plan of Louis XIV. One would suppose that they retire to form, on the other side, a part of the eastern front; but they are not even seen from the grand court. The architectural ornaments of the garden façade are not many; slight Corinthian pilasters only; the entrance, even, is what may be called a garden door, hardly distinguishable from the other windows of the ground floor.

The staircase is handsome, but not sufficiently so for that to which it leads. I shall not pretend to describe the suite of state apartments. One wonders that men of five feet and some inches high should build, for their own use, rooms so disproportionate to their stature. The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is amongst the largest of these rooms: from its windows are seen the three avenues, called la patte de corbeau, or of some other bird: the ends of these avenues are not near enough to the palace; a defect easily to be supplied. This chamber, the central one of the grande cour, remained unoccupied, in token of respect for the memory of that great monarch, who rendered null the efforts of a powerful coalition against him, put his grandson in quiet possession of Spain and the Indies, carried the frontier of France to the Rhine, made all Europe begin to learn French, and exemplified the truth of William of Wykeham's motto,—"manners maketh man."