“What a horrid place! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed; and bodies removed to the bone-house before they are sufficiently decayed to make their removal decent!... The bone-house is a large, round pit. Into this had been shot from a wheelbarrow the but partly decayed inmates of the smashed coffins. On the north side was a man digging a grave. He was quite drunk. So, indeed, were all the grave-diggers we saw.”
Walker saw the tin plates removed from the coffins broken up, and witnessed how many wagon-loads of bones were taken to the charnel-houses.
Lord Ronald Gower writes in Vanity Fair:—
“The other day I came across a somewhat rare little brochure,—an account of the violation of the royal sepulchres of St. Denis, during the first French Revolution. The work of destruction and sacrilege commenced early in October, 1793, and lasted all the month. The first corpse found was that of Henry IV, the once beloved Henri de Navarre. Some curiosity, if not affection, still seems to have lingered even among those patriots who have constituted themselves body-snatchers, and the bearnais was propped up against the church wall in his shroud, and became quite an attraction for the crowd. One of the republican guards even condescended to cut off the king’s gray, upturned moustache, and place it on his lip; another removed the beard, which he declared he would keep as a relic. After these marks of attention were exhausted, the body was thrown into a huge pit filled with quicklime, into which successively followed those of its ancestors and descendants.
“On the next day the corpses of Henry IV’s wife, Maria de Medicis, that of his son, Louis XIII, and that of his grandson, Louis XIV, were added to this. The body of the sun-king (as Louis XIV’s courtiers loved to call him) was as ‘black as ink.’ What a contrast to that majestic, bewigged head, as we see it on the canvas of Le Brun and Rigault, must not that poor blackened skull have been! The body of the Grand Monarch’s wife and that of his son, the Dauphin (father of Louis XV) followed; all these, and especially the latter, were in a state of shocking decay.
“The following day poor harmless Marie Leczinska’s body was torn from its resting-place, as also were those of the ‘Grand Dauphin,’ the Duke of Burgundy and his wife, and several other princes and princesses of the same race, including three daughters of Louis XV. All these were in a state of terrible decomposition, and in spite of the use of gunpowder and vinegar, the stench was so great that many of the workmen were seized with fever, and others had to continue the grewsome work. By a strange chance, on the very morning that Marie Antoinette’s sufferings came to an end on the Place de la Revolution, the body of another unfortunate queen saw the light of day,—it was on the 16th of October that the body of our Queen Henrietta Maria, who had died in 1669, was taken from its coffin and added to the ghastly heap in the ‘Ditch of the Valois,’ as the pit into which these royal remains were hurled was called; that of her daughter the once ‘Belle Henriette’ came next, and then in quick succession the bodies of Philippe D’Orleans; that of his son, the notorious regent; of his daughter, the no less notorious Duchesse de Berri; of her husband; and half a dozen infants of the same family. On the same day a coffin was cautiously opened. This was found at the entrance of the royal vault (the customary position for that containing the latest deceased king), and contained the remains of Louis ‘le bien aimé.’ No wonder that the body-snatchers hesitated before withdrawing the corpse from its enclosure, for it was remembered that Louis had perished of a most terrible illness, and that an undertaker had died in consequence of placing the already pestilent corpse in its coffin. Consequently it was only on the brink of the ditch that the body was removed and hastily rolled over the edge, but not without the precaution of discharging guns and burning much powder, and even then the air was terribly tainted far and near.
“I turn the page and find that we are only in the thick of all these dead men’s bones and uncleanness, for the republican resurrectionists began by the Bourbons and had still to disentomb all the Valois, and further back, up to the Capetian line, and are not content until the almost legendary remains of Dagobert and Madame Dagobert reappear. Suffice it to add, that after Louis the Well-beloved had been disposed of, came in succession, like the line of royal ghosts seen by Macbeth, Charles V, who died in 1380, whose body was one of the few well-preserved, and was arrayed in royal robes, with a gilt crown and sceptre, still bright; that of his wife, Jeanne de Bourbon, who still held in her bony hand a decayed distaff of wood; Charles VI with his queen, Isabeau de Bavière; Charles VII and his wife, Marie D’Anjou; and then Blanche de Navarre, who died in 1391. Charles VIII, of whom nothing but dust remained, Henry II, Catherine de Medicis, Charles IX, and Henry III, were disinterred on the morning of the 18th; ‘after the workmen’s dinner,’ Louis XII and his queen, and among other less interesting royal remains, the bones of Hugh, Comte de Paris, father of Hugh Capet; and so on the work went, till one tires even of the details of the preservation of this or that king or queen. Can anything be more shocking than to know that all the horrors of decay and decomposition will remain even after two or three centuries have passed over the lifeless form, and that, supposing one has the ill luck to be thus coffined and one’s body removed, ‘a black fluid, emitting a noxious smell,’ will run from out our last home, as was the case with those royal remains during that hot summer month at St. Denis in 1793?”
The Rev. H. R. Haweis says:—
“You cannot preserve the buried dead securely from the outrages of the living. The people who dig graves, or are employed to remove bones, are not as a rule scrupulous, but they are very often drunk. The other day only a number of wild Irish were so employed at New York; the bodies were offered for sale on the ground to a party of medical students. These young fellows had the grace to shrink from the horrors they then witnessed. One coffin was found full of a heavy decomposed mass, like spermaceti; it was used to grease the axle-tree of the cart. Another coffin contained the body of a woman, aged 20, as the inscription announced. She had rested for 107 years—laid there with what tears, what tender regrets of husband, or lover, or mother! But now her head was rudely seized and kicked like a football from one ruffian to the other.”
But the “sweet sleep and calm rest” of the dead was not only broken by the ruthless hand of man, but was even disturbed by the elements.