One of our pleasantest visits was to Pere la Chaise,
the national burying-ground of France, the honored
resting-place of some of her greatest and best children,
the last home of scores of illustrious men and women
who were born to no titles, but achieved fame by their
own energy and their own genius. It is a solemn
city of winding streets and of miniature marble temples
and mansions of the dead gleaming white from out a
wilderness of foliage and fresh flowers. Not
every city is so well peopled as this, or has so ample
an area within its walls. Few palaces exist
in any city that are so exquisite in design, so rich
in art, so costly in material, so graceful, so beautiful.
We had stood in the ancient church of St. Denis, where
the marble effigies of thirty generations of kings
and queens lay stretched at length upon the tombs,
and the sensations invoked were startling and novel;
the curious armor, the obsolete costumes, the placid
faces, the hands placed palm to palm in eloquent supplication—it
was a vision of gray antiquity. It seemed curious
enough to be standing face to face, as it were, with
old Dagobert I., and Clovis and Charlemagne, those
vague, colossal heroes, those shadows, those myths
of a thousand years ago! I touched their dust-covered
faces with my finger, but Dagobert was deader than
the sixteen centuries that have passed over him, Clovis
slept well after his labor for Christ, and old Charlemagne
went on dreaming of his paladins, of bloody Roncesvalles,
and gave no heed to me.
The great names of Pere la Chaise impress one, too,
but differently. There the suggestion brought
constantly to his mind is, that this place is sacred
to a nobler royalty—the royalty of heart
and brain. Every faculty of mind, every noble
trait of human nature, every high occupation which
men engage in, seems represented by a famous name.
The effect is a curious medley. Davoust and
Massena, who wrought in many a battle tragedy, are
here, and so also is Rachel, of equal renown in mimic
tragedy on the stage. The Abbe Sicard sleeps
here—the first great teacher of the deaf
and dumb—a man whose heart went out to every
unfortunate, and whose life was given to kindly offices
in their service; and not far off, in repose and peace
at last, lies Marshal Ney, whose stormy spirit knew
no music like the bugle call to arms. The man
who originated public gas-lighting, and that other
benefactor who introduced the cultivation of the potato
and thus blessed millions of his starving countrymen,
lie with the Prince of Masserano, and with exiled queens
and princes of Further India. Gay-Lussac the
chemist, Laplace the astronomer, Larrey the surgeon,
de Suze the advocate, are here, and with them are
Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger;
Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose
names and whose worthy labors are as familiar in the
remote by-places of civilization as are the historic
deeds of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble
vaults of St. Denis.
