Bohemian Days | Page 9

number, Messrs. Plade, Pisgah and Simp, going together, and
apparently a trifle the worse for the lunch; Freckle followed singly,
having been told to keep at a distance to render the display more
imposing; the landlady and her niece went arm in arm after, and behind
them trode a little old hunchback gentleman, neatly clothed, and
bearing in his hand a black, wooden cross, considerably higher than
himself, on which was painted, in white letters, this inscription:
CHRISTOPHER LEES, CAROLINA DU NORD, ÉTATS
CONFÉDÉRE AMERIQUE. AGE VINGT-QUATRE.
A wreath of yellow immortelles, tied to the crosspiece, was interwoven
with these spangled letters:
"R-E-G-R-E-T-S;"
and the solemn air of the old man seemed to evidence that they were
not meaningless.
The hunchback was Lees' principal creditor. He kept a small restaurant,
where the deceased had been supplied for two years, and his books
showed indebtedness of twenty-eight hundred francs, not a sou of
which he should ever receive. He could ill afford to lose the money,
and had known, indeed, that he should never be paid, a year previous to
the demise. But the friendlessness of the stranger had touched his heart.
Twice every day he sent up a basket of food, which was always
returned empty, and every Sunday climbed the long stairway with a
bottle of the best wine--but never once said, "Pay my bill."
Here he was at the last chapter of exile, still bearing his creditor's cross.

"Give the young man's friends a lunch," he had said to the landlady: "I
will make it right;"--and in the cortege he was probably the only honest
mourner.
Not we, who know Frenchmen by caricature merely, as volatile, fickle,
deceitful, full of artifice, should sit in judgment upon them. He has the
least heart of all who thinks that there is not some heart everywhere!
The charity which tarrieth long and suffereth much wrong, has been
that of the Parisians of the Latin Quarter, during the American war.
Along all the route the folks lifted their hats as the hearse passed by,
and so, through slush and mist and rain, the little company kept straight
toward the barriers, and turned at last into the great gate of the
cemetery of Mt. Parnasse.
They do not deck the cities of the dead abroad as our great sepulchres
are adorned.
Père la Chaise is famed rather for its inmates than its tombs, and Mont
Parnasse and Monte Martre, the remaining places of interment, are
even forbidding to the mind and the eye.
A gate-keeper, in semi-military dress, sounded a loud bell as the hearse
rolled over the curb, and when they had taken an aisle to the left, with
maple trees on either side, and vistas of mean-looking vaults, a
corpulent priest, wearing a cape and a white apron, and attended by a
civil assistant of most villainous physiognomy, met the cortege and
escorted it to its destination.
This was the fosse commune--in plain English, the common trench--an
open lot adjacent to the cemetery, appropriated to bodies interred at
public expense, and presenting to the eye a spectacle which, considered
either with regard to its quaintness or its dreariness, stood alone and
unrivalled.
Nearest the street the ground had long been occupied, trench parallel
with trench, filled to the surface level, sodded green, and each grave
marked by a wooden cross. There was a double layer of bodies beneath,

lying side by side; no margin could of course be given at the surface;
the thickly planted crosses, therefore, looked, at a little distance, like a
great waste of heath or bramble, broken now and then by a dwarf cedar,
and hung to the full with flowers and tokens. The width of the trenches
was that of the added height of two full-grown men, and the length a
half mile perhaps; a narrow passage-way separated them, so that,
however undistinguishable they appeared, each grave could be
indentified and visited.
Close observation might have found much to cheer this waste of flesh,
this economy of space; but to this little approaching company the scene
was of a kind to make death more terrible by association.
A rough wall enclosed the flat expanse of charnel, over which the
scattered houses of the barriers looked widowed through their mournful
windows; and now and then a crippled crone, or a bereaved old pauper,
hobbled to the roadway and shook her white hairs to the rain.
It seemed a long way over the boggy soil to the newly opened trench,
where the hearse stopped with its wheels half-sunken, and the chief
croquemort, without any ado, threw the coffin over his shoulder and
walked to the place of sepulture. Five fossoyeurs, at the remote end of
the trench, were digging and covering, as if their number rather than
their work needed