The artisan or craftsman who fashions the funeral monuments of Paris has a peculiar flight of fancy all his own; though, be it said, throughout the known world, funeral urns and monuments have seldom or never been beautiful, graceful, or even austere or dignified: they have, in fact, mostly been shocking travesties of the ideals and thoughts they should have represented.
It is remarkable that the French architect and builder, who knows so well how to design and construct the habitation of living man, should express himself so badly in his bizarre funeral monuments and the tawdry tinsel wreaths and flowers of their decorations.
An English visitor to Paris in the thirties deplored the fact that her cemeteries should be made into mere show-places, and perhaps rightly enough. At that time they served as a fashionable and polite avenue for promenades, and there was (perhaps even is to-day) a guide-book published of them, and, since grief is paradoxically and proverbially dry, there was always a battery of taverns and drinking-places flanking their entrances.
It was observed by a writer in a Parisian journal of that day that “in the Cimetière du Montmartre—which was the deposit for the gay part of the city—nine tombs out of ten were to the memory of persons cut off in their youth; but that in Père la Chaise—which served principally for the sober citizens of Paris—nine out of ten recorded the ages of persons who had attained a good old age.”
CHAPTER VII.
WAYS AND MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
The means of communication in and about Paris in former days was but a travesty on the methods of the “Metropolitain,” which in our time literally whisks one like the wings of the morning, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Vincennes, and from the Place de la Nation to the Trocadero.
In 1850 there were officially enumerated over twenty-eight hundred boulevards, avenues, rues, and passages, the most lively being St. Honoré, Richelieu, Vivienne, Castiglione, de l’Université,—Dumas lived here at No. 25, in a house formerly occupied by Chateaubriand, now the Magazin St. Thomas,—de la Chaussée d’Antin, de la Paix, de Grenelle, de Bac, St. Denis, St. Martin, St. Antoine, and, above all, the Rue de Rivoli,—with a length of nearly three miles, distinguished at its westerly end by its great covered gallery, where the dwellings above are carried on a series of 287 arcades, flanked by boutiques, not very sumptuous to-day, to be sure, but even now a promenade of great popularity. At No. 22 Rue de Rivoli, near the Rue St. Roch, Dumas himself lived from 1838 to 1843.