DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN.
The western and southern portions of Continental Europe, in which the Latin race predominates, hardly contain a cemetery that can be called of gloomy aspect. The crypt of St. Denis could have never produced the unpleasant impression, which makes the flesh creep, that is felt on entering the Royal vault at Windsor, or “the heroes’ vault” beneath St. Paul’s. The recently exhumed sepulchres of Etruria look more like a fine art collection than anything else; and totally fail, if it ever was intended that they should have done otherwise, to impress the visitor with a sentiment of anything approaching either awe or disgust. The Roman urns in the Louvre and Campana Museum form a beautiful contrast to the Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi beside them. It may be said of the Latin family, whether in ancient Rome or grafted on the Gallic stock, that far from being repelled by death, they seemed rather to be attracted towards it. The French, who are descended from them, show no tendency to invest death with anything that is horrible. The ceremonies and pageants got up by the “Compagnie des Pompes Funèbres,” are simply dingy. Far from the Latinised Gauls be anything approaching a Valhalla! In their notions of a “hereafter,” they take entirely after their Roman ancestors, whose dead were provided with Elysian fields, and who cared no more about putting an end to their lives, than the Neapolitan brigand does to put an end to his neighbour’s. What Frenchman can be frightened by a funeral or a funeral sermon into any fear of or belief in eternity of punishment? The very notion of such a thing is to him supremely ridiculous. He might as easily be frightened by a ghost-story. The Catholic Church hardly ventures to put mortality prominently forward in dealing with Voltaire’s countrymen, not even when dealing with those who are not, in religious matters, greatly given to scepticism. If perchance any of them accept as an article of faith the terrors of the other world, the crowded Morgue contradicts them flatly, or accuses them of self-deception. The whole tendency of the soi-disant philosophy across the Channel is to prove death to be an inevitable crisis, for the purpose of effecting a certain modification of one’s being. The tomb-stones and the grave-stones inculcate a similar belief, although nobody intended that they should have ever done so. Mrs. Stowe was more inclined to laugh and be satirical when visiting the vaults of the Pantheon, than to moralise or grow sad, and who ever felt sorry but for the living when visiting Père la Chaise? That vast graveyard is not the least gay looking of the many gay sights which strike the attention of the stranger during his first visit to the Imperial city. Montmartre is no less so; and avenues, shaded by yew and cypress, fail to give solemnity to the flat cemetery of Mount Parnassus. Even the absence of sunshine and the presence of subterranean gloom do not render the catacombs so awfully sepulchral, as they would certainly be in regions inhabited by the Scandinavian Slave, or Saxon. There is a geometrical precision, a scientific classification, an artistic design about the piles of skulls, thigh bones, shin bones, and all the bones that form the human skeleton, ranged as they are, row above row, and forming the surface of endless galleries, that gives a very opposite impression to that occasioned by the disorder and decay in which we invariably invest mortality.
The yellow immortelles, beady circlets, and divers other devices of French fancy, hanging on crosses or lying at their bases, impart a certain liveliness to the provincial churchyards, into the precincts of which the bat and owl hardly venture, although the beetle is heard in them as frequently as the grasshopper. So striking is their cheerfulness of aspect that they give the lie to the ci-git upon the tombstones, and rather tend to bear out the theories of Lamennais or Père Enfantin than those of Calvin or the Trappists.
But this rule is not without its exceptions; and as exceptions are always more note-worthy than the tame things governed by rules, of them we shall henceforth deal. Clamart may be considered the representative one of France, as are, for very different reasons, the caves of Palermo in Sicily. Victor Hugo, in his “Last Days of a Condemned,” has told the world how the first is exclusively reserved for those whose mortal bodies escape by a natural death from the jail or the penitentiary, or whose mutilated remains have found their way from the amphitheatre of medicine, after being sent to it from the hospital or the guillotine.
Long and wide strips of rank grass, running parallel to each other, and stretching across a wall enclosed hill-side, mark the common ditch into which the pauper, or the malefactor, are together tumbled. A gigantic wooden cross of ghastly white colour, and an equally ghastly whitewashed chapel, provided by the paternal care of a government solicitous for the welfare of the dead, that were, when living, left to perish, increase rather than diminish the dreary uniformity of this Aceldama. Strips of faded green again divide the bands of unpleasantly rank verdure which mark the common grave of the miserable outcasts of society. They are parched by the easterly winds that blow across the dreary plain, which this hill-side cemetery faces. So are a few stunted cypresses in the neighbourhood of the chapel. That building never held within its walls a Sunday congregation, or witnessed a wedding, or a christening. It is destitute of bell, or belfry; and its oblong quadrilateral door only opens at break of day, and closes before the rising sun has chased aside the grey mist of morning. During that short period a hurried prayer is said, and a mass mumbled in the presence of a few hard-faced men, dressed in semi-military livery, who look like sheriffs’ officers, and stand beside clumsy deal boxes laid on wooden stretchers.
Yet this chapel has less frequently resounded to the sob, than to the echo of unfeeling laughter. Nobody, in all probability, ever yet shed a tear in it. But could tears recall the dead to life, to shed them would have been an act which the occupants of the boxes would, most likely, have resented. Still, if the Ci-git on the huge white cross be no vain word, how miserable should they not be, lying on that hill-side of Clamart. An indescribable sense of oppression is aroused by a visit to it. The presence of gendarmes, soldiers, and police
