The famous Cemetery, which contains nearly 20,000 monuments, great and small, is a curious spectacle to those who have hitherto seen only American and English burial-grounds. Père Lachaise is a city of the dead; not “God’s Acre,” or the garden in which precious seed have been committed to the dark, warm, sweet earth in hope of Spring-time and deathless bloom. The streets are badly paved and were so muddy when we were there, that we had to pick our steps warily in climbing the steep avenue beginning at the gates. Odd little constructions, like stone sentry-boxes, rise on both sides of the way. Most of these are surrounded by railings. All have grated doors, through which one can survey the closets within. Flagging floors, plain stone, or plastered walls and ceilings; low shelves or seats at the back, where the meditative mourner may sit to weep her loss, or kneel to pray for the belovéd soul,—these are the same in each. The monotony of the row is broken occasionally by a chapel, an enlarged and ornate edition of the sentry-box, or a monument resembling in form those we were used to see in other cemeteries. The avenues are rather shady in summer. At our November visit, the boughs were nearly bare, and rotting leaves, trampled in the mud of the thoroughfares, made the place more lugubrious. Really cheerful or beautiful it can never be. The flowers set in the narrow beds between tombs and curbings, scarcely alleviate the severely business-like aspect. Still less is this softened by the multitudinous bugled and beaded ornaments depending from the spikes of iron railings, cast upon sarcophagi, and the marble ledges within the gates. All Soul’s Day was not long past and we supposed this accounted for the superabundance of these offerings. We were informed subsequently that there are seldom fewer than we saw at this date. About and within one burial-closet—a family-tomb—we counted fifty-seven bugle wreaths of divers patterns, in all the hues of the rainbow, besides the conventional black-and-white. The parade of mortuary millinery, for a while absurd, became presently sickening, horribly tawdry and glistening. It was a relief to laugh heartily and naturally when we saw a child pick up a garland of shiny purple beads, and set it rakishly upon the bust of Joseph Fourier, the inclination of the decoration over the left eyebrow making him seem to wink waggishly at us, in thorough enjoyment of the situation.
We wanted to be thoughtful and respectful in presence of the dead, but the achievement required an effort which was but lamely successful. Dispirited we did become, by and by, and fatigued with trampling up steep lanes and cross-alleys. Carriages cannot enter the grounds, and even a partial exploration of them is a weariness. We drooped like the weeping-willow set beside Alfred de Musset’s tomb, before we reached it. An attenuated and obstinately disconsolate weeper is the tree planted in obedience to his request:—
“Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai,
Plantez un saule au cimetière;
J’aime son feuillage éploré,
La pâleur m’en est douce et chère;
Et son ombre sera légère,
À la terre où je dormirai.”
The conditions of the sylvan sentinel whose sprays caressed his bust, were, when we beheld it, comically “according to order.” There were not more than six branches upon the tree, a few sickly leaves hanging to each. At its best the foliage must have been “pale” and the shade exceedingly “light.”
The Gothic chapel roofing in the sarcophagus of Abelard and Heloïse, was built of stones from the convent of Paraclet, of which Heloïse was, for nearly half a century, Lady Superior. From this retreat she addressed to her monkish lover letters that might have drawn tears of blood from the heart of a flint; which impelled Abelard to the composition of quires of homilies upon the proper management of the nuns in her charge, including by-laws for conventual housewifery. Under the pointed arches the mediæval lovers rest, side by side, although they were divided in death by the lapse of twenty-two years. Sarcophagus and effigies are very old, having been long kept among the choice antiquities of a Parisian museum and placed in Père Lachaise by the order of Louis Philippe. The monument was originally set up in the Abbey of Heloïse near the provincial town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where the rifled vault is still shown. Prior and abbess slumbered there for almost seven centuries. Their statues are of an old man and old woman, vestiges of former beauty in the chiseled features; more strongly drawn lines of thought and character in brow, lip, and chin. They wear their conventual robes.