FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Lampadius, in his Life of Mendelssohn, said of the composer’s death: “His features soon assumed an almost glorified expression. So much he looked like one in sleep that some of his friends thought that it could not be death, an illusion which is often given to the eye of love. His friends Bendemann and Hübner took a cast of his features as he lay.”
A clever Frenchman said not long since, in the Paris Gaulois, that the Pantheon is nothing but a Grand Hotel, in which the distinguished guests find a temporary lodging-place, and then, like other transients, give up their rooms to somebody else. Mirabeau, Marat, Rousseau, and Voltaire boarded there for a time, and then surrendered their apartments, which are now occupied by Victor Hugo and a few men of no literary, artistic, or political importance; all of whom will, no doubt, in their turn, and before many years, be forced to find some second-class pension, where the rates are lower and the service is bad.
It was discovered lately that Mirabeau had again changed his quarters, and that his present address cannot be ascertained. He was carried in great pomp, and with many porters and in many ’busses, to the Pantheon, in 1791; but with Marat he was “de-Pantheonized by order of the National Convention” a year or two later. Marat’s body was thrown into a common sewer in the Rue Montmartre; that of Mirabeau was placed, with no pomp whatever, in the cemetery of Saint-Marcel, the criminals’ burying-ground, where, now that it is wanted once more—this time for honorable disposal—it cannot be found. Mirabeau’s is the face of a man perfectly satisfied with his own achievements and with his own personal appearance. He believed, and he was courageous enough to say, that pure physical beauty in man could only exist in a face which was pitted with small-pox, his own being so marked! And he looks here as if his last thought in life had been one of profound admiration for himself. An eye-witness of his funeral said to one of his biographers that, “except a single trace of physical suffering, one perceived with emotion the most noble calm and the sweetest smile upon that face, which seemed enwrapped in a living sleep, and occupied with an agreeable dream.”
G. R. MIRABEAU