Peripatetic skeletons and ashes are à la mode in this polite country. The “manes,” poets and epitaphs are so fond of apostrophizing, should have lively wits and faithful memories if they would keep the run of their mortal parts.
Marshal Ney has neither sentry-box, nor chapel, nor memorial-tablet. His grave is within a square plat, railed in by an iron fence. The turf is fresh above him, and late autumn roses, lush and sweet, were blooming around. The ivy, which grows as freely in France as brambles and bind-weed with us, made a close, green wall of the railing. We plucked a leaf, as a souvenir. It is twice as large as our ivy-leaves, shaded richly with bronze and purple, and whitely veined, and there were hundreds as fine upon the vine.
One path is known as that of the “artistes,” and is much frequented. Upon Talma’s head-stone is carved a tragic mask. Music weeps over the bust of Bellini and beside Chopin’s grave, and, in bas-relief, crowns the sculptured head of Cherubini. Bernardin de St. Pierre lies near Boïeldieu, the operatic composer. Denon, Napoleon’s companion in Egypt, and general director of museums under the Empire, sits in bronze, dark and calm as a dead Pharaoh, in the neighborhood of Madame Blanchard, the aëronaut, who perished in her last ascent. There was a picture of the disaster in Parley’s Magazine, forty years ago. I remembered it—line for line, the bursting flame and smoke, the falling figure—at sight of the inscription setting forth her title to artistic distinction. Upon another avenue lie La Fontaine, Molière,—(another itinerant, re-interred here in 1817,) Laplace, the astronomer, and Manuel Garcia, the gifted father of a more gifted daughter,—Malibran. “Around the corner,” we stumbled, as it were, upon the tomb of Madame de Genlis.
Rachel sleeps apart from Gentile dust in the Jewish quarter of Père Lachaise. Beside the bare stone closet above her vault is a bush of laurestinus, with glossy green leaves. The floor inside was literally heaped with visiting-cards, usually folded down at one corner to signify that he or she, paying the compliment of a post-mortem morning-call, deposited the bit of pasteboard in person. There was at least a half bushel of these touching tributes to dead-and-gone genius. No flowers, natural or false, no immortelles—no bugle wreaths! Only visiting-cards, many engraved with coronets and other heraldic signs, tremendously imposing to simple Republicans. We examined fifty or sixty, returning them to the closet, with scrupulous care, after inspection. Some admirers had added to name and address, a complimentary or regretful phrase that would have titillated the insatiate vanity of the deceased, could she have read it,—wounded to her death as she had been by the success of her rival Ristori. Her votaries may have had this reminiscence of her last days in mind, and a shadowy idea that her “manes,” in hovering about her grave, would be cognizant of their compassionate courtesies.
Most of the offerings were from what we never got out of the habit of styling “foreigners.” There were a few snobbish-looking English cards,—one with a sentence, considerately scribbled in French—“Mille et mille compliments.” So far as our inspection went, there was not one that bore an American address. Nor did we leave ours as exceptions to this deficiency in National appreciation of genius and artistic power—or National paucity of sentimentality.
CHAPTER XIII.
Southward-Bound.
“DO NOT go to Rome!” friends at home had implored by letter and word of mouth, prior to our sailing from the other side. English acquaintances and friends caught up the cry. In Paris, it swelled into impassioned adjuration, reiterated in so many forms, and at times so numerous and unseasonable that we nervously avoided the remotest allusion to the Eternal City in word. But sleeping and waking thoughts were tormented by mental repetitions that might, or might not be the whispers of guardian angels.