The American in Paris; vol. 2 of 2

by John Sanderson

Paris, October 29th, 1835.

I took advantage of a beautiful day, which peeped out yesterday, to pay my respects to Père la Chaise, and I am going to give you some account of this celebrated city of the dead. But what can I say? I feel scarce wit enough to talk about the weather, and I am going to tell you of that which all the world has described so beautifully. I know not the reason, but I have even less sense and imagination than usual, since I am in Paris. If it were not for Madame de Sevigné, and a few other such characters, I would lay the blame upon the heavy, unthinking and hazy influences of these northern climates. I followed the funeral of Bellini, the composer, author of Pirati, Puritani, and other first-rate operas. Is it not a pity to die with so much talent at twenty-nine, when so many fools live out their four-score? I do not recollect any thing that old Methusaleh said or did, with his nine hundred years; and he could not have made such an opera as Puritani, if he had lived as many more. He was accompanied (Bellini, I mean) by the music of all Paris; and the music of the spheres must have played, this day, a sweeter harmony.

The mass of Cherubini, so appropriate to the occasion, and so much better than the archbishop’s prayers, was forbidden by the archbishop, because it had feminine voices in it; and his worship would not have the chapel of the Invalids, all hung over so beautifully with bloody flags, profaned by musical women; not even by the exquisite Grisi. So we had the 39th Psalm. Don’t you think the spirit of the composer must have winced? But the march, with full band, along the Boulevards for several miles, and the end of the ceremony at Père la Chaise, were imposing. Speeches were pronounced in Italian and French by good orators; and, among the listeners, some of us were queens and princesses. The breezes whispered though the pines, and a thunder storm, as if expressly, came over the sun, and played bass in the clouds, and the clouds themselves wept as the grave closed upon Bellini.—I went to the Invalids, with a pretty English woman, one of his scholars, who wailed his loss inconsolably, and who, for certain, was in love with him. Women, you know, always fall in love with their music masters; Mary Queen of Scots, and the pretty Mrs. Thrale into the bargain.

This cemetery of Père la Chaise, thirty years ago, had fourteen tombs; it counts, in the present year, fifty thousand. Hundreds of architects, and sculptors, and statuaries, besides multitudes of labourers, find here a new source of occupation, and improvement in the arts; so that a goodly part of the present generation gets its living by the death of its predecessors. Here is a whole street of marble yards, which manufactures tombs for domestic and foreign commerce, near a mile long; and mighty heaps of bronze, granite and marble, exquisitely chiselled, recommending themselves to the notice of the public. Tombstones, urns, bronze gates, iron railings, crosses, pillars, pyramids, statues and all the furniture of the grave, are laid out, and exhibited here, as the merchandise of the shops and bazaars of the latest and newest fashions—“Grand Magazin à la General Foy—à l’Abelard et Heloise,” &c.; as in the city, “Grand Magazin du Doge de Venise,” and by trying to under-bury one another, they have reduced funeral expenses in every branch to their minimum;—there is, perhaps, no place in the world where one can die, and be buried so moderately, as in Paris. Here is one selling out at first cost, to close a concern; and another’s whole stock of tombs is brought to the hammer, by the death of the proprietor.

These grave-merchants used to follow the funeral processions, in swarms, to the verge of the tomb, offering to the mourners bills and advertisements, and specimens of their industry, but this emulation has been lately forbidden, by an order of police. These people have got, by professional habit, to think, like the philosophers, that the principal business of man, upon this earth, is to die. The staple of conversation is, the grave; and there is as much pedantry here about the dead people, as in the Latin Quarter there is about the dead languages.—“When do you think you can pay me that bill of marble, M. Grigou?”—“Ah, sir! business is very slack just now; and the season, you see, is almost over. M. Barbeau, I have been twenty years in the trade, and never saw such times. It really seems as if people had left off dying. But, if business becomes brisk, as we expect, towards Christmas, I will pay you off then; if not, you will have to wait till next August.—— When the cholera was here—— Helas! I fear we shall never see such times again.”—“Eh bien, patience, M. Grigou, we must hope for the best.”

They have here, too, a kind of Exchange, where they meet to see the state of the market—to see the newest fashions or inventions of urns and crosses, and other sepulchral images, and to read over the bills of mortality, as elsewhere one reads the price current. The joy of a death is, of course, proportionate to the worth, fashion and distinction of the individual who has died. When General Mortier was killed, on the 28th, stock rose one and a quarter.—“Well! what is there to-day?”—“Nothing!—and getting worse and worse!—but what can one expect else under such a detestable government? You remember how it was under the Restoration. Then we had such persons as Marshal Suchet, and Madame Demidoff to bury; now we bury nothing but the canaille. Even under Charles, we had some few nobles left, who could pay for a snug mausoleum; but what is a French nobleman now?—a poor, half-cut gentleman, with a ribbon in his button-hole, which he calls a decoration, and without money to pay the grave digger or the sexton.—— Ah! M. Grigou, things must have a change!”

The gate of the cemetery, which terminates the view at the end of this street, is surmounted by statuary, and is magnificent, like that of some great prince. It is always besieged by equipages, and vehicles of every kind, of the visiters, who are coming and going at all hours—all except one—his equipage goes home empty! Around this entrance is a great crowd of women, all over smiles, who offer you wreaths, chaplets, and crosses of orange blossom, amaranth, and other ever-green, very prettily interwoven, and they get a living by this little trade. As you ascend the hill, you see groups of visiters, noisy and talkative, who on entering are suddenly silent, struck with the awfulness of the place. A kind of death-chill runs through the blood. But after a closer view the mind becomes serene, and even roams with a delightful curiosity amongst the tombs.

Nearly all the ground is covered with small pines, and with fern, woodbines, and jessamines twisted into tufted thickets. There is quite a deficiency of cypress and willow, and hemlock; the vegetation is generally stinted in its growth, and looks forlorn enough indeed. Monuments of brightest marble and exquisite sculpture dazzle the eye on all sides; and there are smooth and gravelled walks, terraces, and flowery banks, paths winding along the hillside, and little scenery of every variety; and nature has borrowed so many ornaments from art, and wears them with so lively a grace, that one is disposed rather to admiration than to melancholy musings; one would think that Hymen and Cupid and not Death walked through her hills and valleys.

This city, like living cities, has its fashionable and rabble districts; its Broadways and Chestnut streets, its Southwark, and Northern Liberties. On the summits and flanks of all the hills, or apart, and half hidden in groves of pines, are mausoleums rich with Egyptian, Grecian, and modern luxury. It seems as if the dead, the business of life being done, had retired here to their magnificent villas. Only think of your scraggy grave-yards of Philadelphia—enough to disgust one with dying. Distinguished and learned dust is collected here from all nations, and virtues are puffed and advertised in all human languages. Whatever one may think of the French people alive, one cannot hope to meet any where a better set of dead people. Here are none but faithful husbands and incorruptible wives, and you would think it had rained patriots. As for great generals, they seem to come up in the parsley-bed as they did in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Surely Père la Chaise still exercises his office of absolution on these grounds.

At the foot of the hill are immense multitudes of dead in a level and open field, assorted in rows, as the vegetables in the Garden of Plants. These are the working people of the other world. They have no shelter of marble, or of shrubbery, or of cypress; no weeping willow hangs its branches upon the little hill of earth, but a small black board, shaped into a cross, and standing up prim at the head of each one, reveals his humble name and merits. You see the hearse arrive here with a few attendants on foot. A priest in an old rusty gown, a boy in a frock no longer white, and an officer under a cocked hat, attend. These form a little procession from the hearse: the priest mutters an epitome of the service, and sprinkles the holy water upon the grave; he, the grave-digger, and the driver betraying not the slightest emotion in the performance of these duties; and the whole escort disappears suddenly and silently. Beyond this, is a field of a still humbler lot, where anything is buried; this they call the Fosses communs. They who have no money, consequently no friends, are buried here. It is a yawning excavation, into which one cannot look without horror. The corpse is carried down a long stairway, and placed without distinction of age or sex in a row alongside the corpse which preceded it; and the name of the individual is no more heard—upon the earth. He was perhaps a suicide, or a victim of some accident or murder, a stranger without a friend, or a labourer without a home. No priest attends here.—One other piece of earth, retired from the rest, has a special designation. It is the only religious distinction of the cemetery; the burial place of the Jews.