“Beneath her palm, here sad Judea weeps.”
The graves of the rich are mostly held in perpetuity; those of the poor are disposable anew at the end of every six years; the first lessee having always the right of pre-emption. There is a chapel on the highest spot of the cemetery, and from its threshold the priest has a naked view of all Paris. He has spread out before him his whole stock in trade, and sees his customers winding up the hill; of which every day furnishes him its contingent. If for the district of the poor, he performs the service, as I have described, by his deputies.
But when you see the portals of the marble palace open between the Corinthian columns, and winged angels, chiselled from the marble of Genoa, and the priest kneeling in deep devotion before the altar, all of gold; you will see at the same time the whole street leading up to the Barrière d’Aulney filled with an immense cortége of gorgeous equipages, all of crape; and you will see in the first carriages persons in deep distress, mopping their eyes, all swollen with grief. Keep in your tears, they are not the least vexed. On the contrary, they cry with a great deal of pleasure. They are crying by the month, and getting their living by it. This custom of crying by deputy was practised by the Romans, and is common to all the refined nations of modern Europe; and it is known that hired weepers can wail and cry a great deal better than they who are really grieved; they have a greater quantity of salt water, and have given it the habit of running out by the eyes. The coffin descends from the hearse, glittering with the precious metals, and whilst music wakes around, or speeches are pronounced in eloquent grief, or masses chanted in classic Latin, it is conveyed with pomp into its vault, and laid up for eternity upon its shelf. There is a person here, who keeps a register of the names of the deceased, and is a kind of chief clerk to the Fates.
There is one day of the year when all Paris comes hither dressed in white robes, ten thousand at a time, to do honour to the dead. It looks as if the sheeted dead themselves had risen from the earth. This is called the Fête des Morts. Each one brings a garland or crown, and hangs it over a friend or relative; and the whole city bends before the graves of General Foy, Manuel, and Benjamin Constant. Indeed every day of the year that the weather will permit, the cemetery is crowded, either with strangers led by curiosity, or with friends busied in trimming the foliage or flowers, or hanging funeral wreaths upon the monuments. This may be partly vanity, but vanity is a very good quality, if rightly directed, and a great many excellent virtues may be grafted on it. As for myself, I have always found it exceedingly difficult to practise several of the virtues when no one was looking on.
I observed, on entering, a gothic monument, and under its dome, two figures of persons recumbent at the side of each other, who were not always of marble. I will not tell you their names. If they had gone quietly with their marriage articles to St. Sulpice, and to bed, and distributed the wedding cake the next day to their cousins of St. Germain, I should not now have the pleasure of musing upon this little gothic chapel; we should have been deprived of one of the best love-tales that ever was, and some of the best verses in our English language, and Nouvelle Heloise into the bargain. Unsuccessful wooing, you see, has its uses. What would you gentle shepherdesses have done without Petrarch’s sonnets, without Virgil’s fourth book, and Sappho’s little ditty, Englished by Philips.
The Republic brought this pair of lovers from Chalons to Paris, where they have been knocked about, till they have become as common as any pair of students and grisettes of the Luxembourg, (the barbarians!) instead of embowering them in the shady wood at a distance from the road, by the side of a murmuring and romantic stream, where the traveller might alight from his horse, just at setting sun, and give his undisturbed and undivided feelings to their hapless fates. Here they are, the unfortunates, alongside of any body, who has died in lawful wedlock, and their history, as if no one knew it, written upon their tomb, in fine round text, with their names. The children are learning to spell on it: a, b, ab; e by itself e; l, a, r, d, lard.—I am now writing from the spot, perhaps the very spot in which their hearts beat so high in love, and sank so deep in despair—in the very spot, for all I know, in the very chamber—where she “hung upon his lips, and drank delicious poison from his eye!”—where now, alas, no loves are disappointed, and where there is no drinking of any thing stronger or sweeter than a little vin ordinaire after one’s potage.
On leaving this fairy spot, I wandered along a hundred little footpaths, and read over a thousand crabbed names, which carried no signification to the mind, of a thousand polite nothings, who had put on their breeches in the morning and taken them off at night, and who have monuments in Père la Chaise for such merits—to Monsieur Doda, who made excellent patés de foies gras; besides, he made the Papage Vero-Doda, and he has the mausoleum of a prince, splendid with festoons, I believe of sausages, on the pediment; and a Monsieur Sebastian, who made shoes for the Duchesse de Berri’s dear little feet, has one still more magnificent,—this is the man who made the slipper “dans un moment d’enthousiasme;” and lastly a coiffeur—inexorable fate!
“Sensible et genereux, dont le cœur gouta l’ivresse
Du bonheur, du genie.” ... and so forth.
An obelisk of Carrara marble, forty feet high, was about to rise upon the tomb of M. Boulard, “Upholsterer.” He had journeyed himself to Genoa and chosen the marble, and a foundation trench forty feet deep had been dug, and 400,000 francs devoted to the monument; but his heirs have thought proper to depart from the intentions of the testator, and have buried him in a chapel at St. Mandé which he had built himself at the cost of a million of francs. The site of his grave here is occupied by the pyramidal monument, with two lateral staircases of fifteen or twenty steps descending to its base, of a rich Portuguese family, Dios Santos.
A Frenchman, who enjoys life so well, is, of all creatures, the least concerned at leaving it. He selects his marble of the finest tints; and has often his coffin made and grave dug in advance. I noticed several open graves, which seemed to me yawning for their victims. They dig a good many a-head, so as to have them on hand, like ready-made coats (without the sleeves) at the mercer’s. If a Frenchman buries his wife, he erects her a tomb and one (blanc) for himself, at the side of her. Then frolics out life in wine and good dinners, and has his tomb at Père la Chaise as his box at the opera. He buries his wife too the more splendidly, having a half interest in the concern.