The catacombs of Paris are purposely ignored here, as appealing to a special variety of morbidity which is as unpleasant to deal with and to contemplate as are snakes preserved in spirit, and as would be—were we allowed to see them—the sacred human reliques which are preserved, even to-day, at various pilgrims’ shrines throughout the Christian world. That vast royal sepulchre of the abbey church of St. Denis, which had been so outrageously despoiled by the decree of the Convention in 1793, was in a measure set to rights by Louis XVIII., when he caused to be returned from the Petits Augustins, now the Palais des Beaux Arts, and elsewhere, such of the monuments as had not been actually destroyed. The actual spoliation of these shrines belongs to an earlier day than that of which this book deals.
The history of it forms as lurid a chapter as any known to the records of riot and sacrilege in France; and the more the pity that the motion of Barrere (“La main puissante de la République doit effacer inpitoyablement ces epitaphes”) to destroy these royal tombs should have had official endorsement.
The details of these barbarous exhumations were curious, but not edifying; the corpse of Turenne was exhibited around the city; Henri IV.—“his features still being perfect”—was kicked and bunted about like a football; Louis XIV. was found in a perfect preservation, but entirely black; Louis VIII. had been sewed up in a leather sack; and François I. and his family “had become much decayed;” so, too, with many of the later Bourbons.
In general these bodies were deposited in a common pit, which had been dug near the north entrance to the abbey, and thus, for the first time in the many centuries covered by the period of their respected demises, their dust was to mingle in a common blend, and all factions were to become one.
Viollet-le-Duc, at the instruction of Napoleon III., set up again, following somewhat an approximation of the original plan, the various monuments which had been so thoroughly scattered, and which, since their return to the old abbey, had been herded together without a pretence at order in the crypt.
Paris had for centuries been wretchedly supplied with cimetières. For long one only had existed, that of the churchyard of St. Innocents’, originally a piece of the royal domain lying without the walls, and given by one of the French kings as a burial-place for the citizens, when interments within the city were forbidden.
It has been calculated that from the time of Philippe-Auguste over a million bodies had been interred in these fosses communes.
In 1785 the Council of State decreed that the cemetery should be cleared of its dead and converted into a market-place. Cleared it was not, but it has since become a market-place, and the waters of the Fontaine des Innocents filter briskly through the dust of the dead of ages.
Sometime in the early part of the nineteenth century the funeral undertakings of Paris were conducted on a sliding scale of prices, ranging from four thousand francs in the first class, to as low as sixteen francs for the very poor; six classes in all.
This law-ordered tarif would seem to have been a good thing for posterity to have perpetuated.