At this moment the clergy and all the assistants throw themselves upon their knees, pray, and rise again. The Duke d'Uzes withdraws his baton from the vault, and brandishing it, calls out: "Long live the King!"
The King-at-Arms repeats: "Long live the King! long live the King! long live the King! Charles, tenth of the name, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre, very Christian, very august, very puissant, our very honored lord and good master, to whom God grant long and happy life! Cry ye all: Long live the King!" Then the trumpets, drums, fifes, and instruments of the military bands break into a loud fanfare, and their sound is mingled with the prolonged acclamations of the assembly, whose cries "Long live the King! long live Charles X.!" contrast with the silence of the tombs.
"To this outburst of the public hopes," says the Moniteur, "succeeded the return of pious and mournful duties; the tomb is closed over the mortal remains of the monarch whose subjects, restored to happiness, greeted him on his return from the land of exile with the name of Louis le Desire, and who twice reconciled his people with Europe. This imposing ceremony being ended, the princes were again escorted into the Abbey to their apartments, by the Grand Master, the Master of Ceremonies and his aides, preceded by the Master-at-Arms, and the Heralds-at-Arms, who had resumed their caps, coats-of-arms, and rods. Then the crowd slowly dispersed. We shall not try to express the sentiments to which this imposing and mournful ceremony must give rise. With the regrets and sorrow caused by the death of a prince so justly wept, mingle the hopes inspired by a King already the master of all hearts. This funeral ceremony when, immediately after the burial of a monarch whom God had called to Himself, were heard cries of 'Long live Charles X.,'—the new King greeted at the tomb of his august predecessor,—this inauguration, amid the pomps of death, must have left impressions not to be rendered, and beyond the power of imagination to represent."
Reader, if this recital has interested you, go visit the Church of Saint-Denis. There is not, perhaps, in all the world, a spectacle more impressive than the sight of the ancient necropolis of kings. Enter the basilica, admirably restored under the Second Empire. By the mystic light of the windows, faithful reproductions of those of former centuries,—the funerals of so many kings, the profanations of 1793, the restoration of the tombs,—all this invades your thought and inspires you with a dim religious impression of devotion. These stones have their language. Lapides clamabunt. They speak amid the sepulchral silence. Listen to the echo of a far-away voice. There, under these arches, centuries old, the 21st of August, 1670, Bossuet pronounced the funeral oration of Madame Henriette of England. He said:—
"With whatever haughty distinction men may flatter themselves, they all have the same origin, and this origin insignificant. Their years follow each other like waves; they flow unceasingly, and though the sound of some is slightly greater and their course a trifle longer than those of others, they are together confounded in an abyss where are known neither princes nor kings nor the proud distinctions of men, as the most boasted rivers mingle in the ocean, nameless and inglorious with the least known streams."
Is not the Church of Saint-Denis itself a funeral discourse in stone more grandiose and eloquent than that of the reverend orator? Regard on either side of the nave these superb mausoleums, these pompous tombs that are but an empty show, and since their dead dwell not in them, contemplate these columns that seem to wish to bear to heaven the splendid testimony of our nothingness! There, at the right of the main altar, descend the steps that lead to the crypt. There muse on all the kings, the queens, the princes, and princesses, whose bones have been replaced at hazard within these vaults, after their bodies had been, in 1793, cast into a common ditch in the cemetery of the Valois to be consumed by quicklime. The great ones of the earth, dispossessed of their sepulchres, could they not say, in the region of shades, in the mournful words of the Sermonnaire:—
"Death does not leave us body enough to require room, and it is only the tombs that claim the sight; our body takes another name; even that of corpse, since it implies something of the human form, remains to it but a little time; it becomes a something nameless in any tongue, so truly does everything die in it, even the funeral terms by which its unhappy remains are designated. Thus the Power divine, justly angered by our pride, reduces it to nothingness, and, to level all conditions forever, makes common ashes of us all."
The remains of so many sovereigns and princes are no longer even corpses. The corpses have perished as ruins perish. You may no longer see the coffins of the predecessors of Louis XVI. But those of the Martyr-King, of the Queen Marie Antoinette, of the Duke of Berry, of Louis XVIII., are there before you in the crypt. Pause. Here is the royal vault of the Bourbons. Your glance can enter only a narrow grated window, through which a little twilight filters. If a lamp were not lighted at the back, the eye would distinguish nothing. By the doubtful gleam of this sepulchral lamp, you succeed in making out in the gloom the coffins placed on trestles of iron; to the left that of the Duke of Berry, then the two little coffins of his children, dead at birth; then in two rows those of Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, daughters of Louis XV., those of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, those of the two last Princes of Conde, died in 1818 and in 1830, and on the right, at the very extremity of the vault, that of the only sovereign who, for the period of a century, died upon the throne, Louis XVIII.
The royal vault of the Bourbons was diminished more than half to make room for the imperial vault constructed under Napoleon III. The former entrance, on the steps of which stand the Heralds-at-Arms at the obsequies of the kings, has been suppressed. The coffin of Louis XVIII. was not placed on the iron trestles, where it rests to-day, at the time of his funeral. It was put at the threshold of the vault, where it was to have been replaced by that of Charles X.; for by the ancient tradition, when a king of France dies, as his successor takes his place on the throne, so he, in death, displaces his predecessor. But Louis XVIII. waited in vain for Charles X. in the royal vault of the Bourbons; the last brother of Louis XVI. reposes in the chapel of the Franciscans at Goritz.
Charles X. is not alone in being deprived of his rights in his tomb; the Duke and Duchess of Angouleme and the Count of Chambord were so, and also Napoleon III. The second Emperor and Prince Imperial, his son, sleep their sleep in England; for the Bonapartes, like the Bourbons, have been exiled from Saint-Denis. By a decree of the 18th of November, 1858, the man who had re-established the Empire decided that the imperial dynasty should have its sepulture in the ancient necropolis of the kings. Napoleon III. no more, realized his dream than Napoleon I. He had completed under his reign the magnificent vault destined for himself and his race. But once more was accomplished the Sic vos non vobis, and no imperial corpse has ever taken its place in the still empty Napoleonic vault. The opening situated in the church, near the centre of the nave, is at present closed by enormous flagstones framed in copper bands; and as there is no inscription on these, many people whose feet tread them in visiting the church do not suspect that they have beneath them the stairway of six steps leading down to the vault that was to be the burial place of emperors. "Oh, vanity! Oh, nothingness! Oh, mortals ignorant of their destinies!" It is not enough that contending dynasties dispute each other's crowns; their covetousness and rivalry must extend to their tombs. Not enough that sovereigns have been exiled from their country; they must be exiled from their graves. Disappointments in life and in death. This is the last word of divine anger, the last of the lessons of Providence.