Then, when the stone had been replaced, Napoleon vouchsafed the “fantom emperor” a renewal of slumber.
Removed Emperor’s Shrouds.
Victor Hugo, while walking through Aix-la-Chapelle, complained even then of the innumerable violations to which the great Charlemagne’s tomb had been subjected.
“Some day,” said he, “I suppose that a pious and holy thought will enter the mind of some king or emperor. Charlemagne’s remains will be taken from the chest where the sacristans put them and again laid in his tomb.
“What is left of his bones will be religiously reassembled. He will regain his Byzantine vault, his bronze doors, and his marble armchair with its fourteen plates of gold, and the kneeling visitor will be enabled to behold, gleaming vaguely in the darkness, that fantom—crown on head and orb in hand—that once was Charlemagne.”
Well, no such thing was accomplished. Once more the dignitaries of the empire have assembled to open a coffin. The two shrouds that enveloped Charlemagne have been removed—those Oriental fabrics that some calif had sent to the emperor—and since, as the telegraphic despatches say, “the light was not sufficient to operate,” they have been sent to a Friedrichstrasse photographer, who will find light enough, egad!
Voltaire and Rousseau.
We have dug up Richelieu, opened Bossuet’s tomb, disturbed the great Napoleon’s coffin. A few years ago I saw the sarcophagi of Voltaire and Rousseau opened at the Panthéon. I saw the skull of the author of “Candide” passed from hand to hand; I saw men’s finger-nails scratch away its reddish coating (probably due, as Monsieur Berthelot told us, to the sublimate that had preserved the corpse).
In his leaden coffin, with arms crossed upon his breast, I saw the man who had written “The Social Contract”; I saw the onlookers—indifferent or curious—poke their fingers into the empty sockets now bereft of those eyes that had once gazed upon Madame de Warrens, or try to snatch from a jaw-bone—“as a souvenir, monsieur!”—one of those teeth that had touched cherries picked In Madame Gallet’s company.
I was present at that Dance of Death which men call “an historical exhumation.” And the inevitable photographer was there at the Panthéon, just as at Aix-la-Chapelle. Great men’s bones are hustled about, their skulls are pried into and weighed, as if, forsooth, some sparkle of genius could be got out of them!