In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly straight, as far
as the eye could see. The thread of snow that marked the outline of its
coping gave it a dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left three
leafless trees reared their bare black branches against the sky. They
rustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead wood stirred by the
south wind. Above these trees, behind the wall and close against it,
arose the two arms from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. A
few snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there; beyond, the hill
of Montmartre rose sharply, its white shroud broken by oases of brown
earth and sandy patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmounted
by gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint in the mist, as
far as two black windmills. The sky was of a leaden hue, with occasional
cold, bluish streaks as if ink had been applied with a brush! over
Montmartre there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seine
water after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the wings of an
invisible windmill turned and turned,--slow-moving wings, unvarying in
their movement, which seemed to be turning for eternity.
In front of the wall, against which was planted a thicket of dead
cypresses, turned red by the frost, was a vast tract of land upon which
were two rows of crowded, jostling overturned crosses, like two great
funeral processions. The crosses touched and pushed one another and trod
on one another's heels. They bent and fell and collapsed in the ranks.
In the middle there was a sort of congestion which had caused them to
bulge out on both sides; you could see them lying--covered by the snow
and raising it into mounds with the thick wood of which they were
made--upon the paths, somewhat trampled in the centre, that skirted the
two long files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation of a
multitude, the disorder and wavering course of a long march. The black
crosses with their arms outstretched assumed the appearance of ghosts
and persons in distress. The two disorderly columns made one think of a
human panic, a desperate, frightened army. It was as if one were looking
on at a terrible rout.
All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of immortelles, wreaths
of white paper with silver thread, black wreaths with gold thread; but
you could see them beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things,
souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not accept and which
had been picked up in order to make a little toilet for the crosses with
gleanings from the graves.
All the crosses had a name written in white; but there were other names
that were not even written on a piece of wood,--a broken branch of a
tree, stuck in the ground, with an envelope tied around it--such
tombstones as that were to be seen there!
On the left, where they were digging a trench for a third row of
crosses, the workman's shovel threw black dirt into the air, which fell
upon the white earth around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of the
snow, enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be heard; the dull
sound made by the clods of earth and the heavy sound of regular
footsteps; an old priest who was waiting there, his head enveloped in a
black cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a dirty, yellow
surplice, was trying to keep himself warm by stamping his great galoches
on the pavement of the high road, in front of the crosses.
Such was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, those
crosses and that priest said this: "Here sleeps the Death of the common
people; this is the poor man's end!"
* * * * *
O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city of
humanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindly
intentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.
The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speak
of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of
progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is
where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill
themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome
odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working
for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors,
those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have
lengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as a
capital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the common
people of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful
corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to bury
them, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, that
one can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thy
charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed
whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for
them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou
dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou
didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals
a hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest
on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: not
the briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God could
not be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is
always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike against
one another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is common
to all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the
worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfaucon
hastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no more
time than room to rot in: the earth is taken from them before it has
finished with them! before their bones have assumed the color and the
ancient appearance, so to speak, of stone, before the passing years have
effaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! The
excavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they are
the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to
them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In
summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human
charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the
scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there
are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential
flies whose sting is deadly!
* * * * *
Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separates
the lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Following
the directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between the
further line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she made
her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the
trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of
oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth
sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen
the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one
and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the
day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they
glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long
strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.
Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out the
dates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reached
the crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid's
death, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the
9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was not
in the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, to
the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the
12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in all
directions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing,--Germinie had been
buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in the
ground by which to identify her grave!
At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between two
crosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10th
of November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that
spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over her
body it was necessary to pray at random between two dates,--as if the
poor girl's destiny had decreed that there should be no more room on
earth for her body than for her heart!