According to a request in the will of one Mr. Benjamin Dodd, a Roman Catholic, "Citizen and Linnen Draper, who fell from his horse and died soon after," four and twenty persons were at his burial, to each of whom he gave a pair of white gloves, a ring of 10s. value, a bottle of wine, and half-a-crown to be spent on their return that night, "to drink his Soul's Health, then on her Journey for Purification in order to Eternal Rest." He also appointed his "Corps" to be carried in a hearse drawn by six white horses, with white feathers, and followed by six coaches, with six horses to each coach, and commanded that "no Presbyterian, Moderate Low Churchmen, or Occasional Conformists, be at or have anything to do with his Funeral."
(g) Parisian funerals at the present day present many features common to those celebrated in England in the last century. The church, for instance, is elaborately decorated in black for a married man or woman, but in white for a spinster, youth, or child. The costumes of the hired attendants, and these are numerous—I counted one day, quite recently, no less than twenty-four, two to each coach, all handsomely dressed in black velvet—are of the time of Louis XV. I am assured that the expenses of a first-class funeral in Paris, in this year of Grace 1889, sometimes exceeds several hundred pounds.
The lettre de faire part, as it is called, is also a curious feature in the funeral rites of our neighbours. It is an elaborate document in the form of a printed letter, deeply edged with black, and informs that all the members, near and distant, of the deceased's family—they are each mentioned by name and title—request you, not only to attend the funeral, but to pray for his or her soul.
The fashion of sending costly wreaths to cover the coffin is recent, and was quite as unknown in Paris twenty years ago as it was in this country until about the same period. Wreaths of immortelles, sometimes dyed black, were, however, sent to funerals in France in the Middle Ages. In Brittany, the "wake" is almost as common as it is in Ireland, and quite as frequently degenerates into an unedifying spectacle. Like the Irish custom, it originated in the early Christian practice of keeping a light burning by the corpse, and in praying for the repose of the soul, coram the corpse prior to its final removal to the church and grave, certain pagan customs, the distribution of wine and bread, having been introduced, at first possibly from a sense of hospitality, and finally as means of carousal.
RICHARD DAVEY.
