main altar, descend the steps that lead to the crypt.  There muse on all the kings, the queens, the princes, and princesses, whose bones have been replaced at hazard within these vaults, after their bodies had been, in 1793, cast into a common ditch in the cemetery of the Valois to be consumed by quicklime.  The great ones of the earth, dispossessed of their sepulchres, could they not say, in the region of shades, in the mournful words of the Sermonnaire:—­

“Death does not leave us body enough to require room, and it is only the tombs that claim the sight; our body takes another name; even that of corpse, since it implies something of the human form, remains to it but a little time; it becomes a something nameless in any tongue, so truly does everything die in it, even the funeral terms by which its unhappy remains are designated.  Thus the Power divine, justly angered by our pride, reduces it to nothingness, and, to level all conditions forever, makes common ashes of us all.”

The remains of so many sovereigns and princes are no longer even corpses.  The corpses have perished as ruins perish.  You may no longer see the coffins of the predecessors of Louis XVI.  But those of the Martyr-King, of the Queen Marie Antoinette, of the Duke of Berry, of Louis XVIII., are there before you in the crypt.  Pause.  Here is the royal vault of the Bourbons.  Your glance can enter only a narrow grated window, through which a little twilight filters.  If a lamp were not lighted at the back, the eye would distinguish nothing.  By the doubtful gleam of this sepulchral lamp, you succeed in making out in the gloom the coffins placed on trestles of iron; to the left that of the Duke of Berry, then the two little coffins of his children, dead at birth; then in two rows those of Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, daughters of Louis XV., those of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, those of the two last Princes of Conde, died in 1818 and in 1830, and on the right, at the very extremity of the vault, that of the only sovereign who, for the period of a century, died upon the throne, Louis XVIII.

The royal vault of the Bourbons was diminished more than half to make room for the imperial vault constructed under Napoleon III.  The former entrance, on the steps of which stand the Heralds-at-Arms at the obsequies of the kings, has been suppressed.  The coffin of Louis XVIII. was not placed on the iron trestles, where it rests to-day, at the time of his funeral.  It was put at the threshold of the vault, where it was to have been replaced by that of Charles X.; for by the ancient tradition, when a king of France dies, as his successor takes his place on the throne, so he, in death, displaces his predecessor.  But Louis XVIII. waited in vain for Charles X. in the royal vault of the Bourbons; the last brother of Louis XVI. reposes in the chapel of the Franciscans at Goritz.