essieurs. This
dead man, Louis de Breze, is more real, more terrible, more like
inanimate flesh still convulsed with the death agony than all the
tortured corpses that are distorted to-day in funeral monuments.

"But in Montmartre one can yet admire Baudin's monument, which has a
degree of grandeur; that of Gautier, of Murger, on which I saw the other
day a simple, paltry wreath of immortelles, yellow immortelles, brought
thither by whom? Possibly by the last grisette, very old and now
janitress in the neighborhood. It is a pretty little statue by Millet,
but ruined by dirt and neglect. Sing of youth, O Murger!

"Well, there I was in Montmartre Cemetery, and was all at once filled
with sadness, a sadness that is not all pain, a kind of sadness that
makes you think when you are in good health, 'This place is not amusing,
but my time has not come yet.'

"The feeling of autumn, of the warm moisture which is redolent of the
death of the leaves, and the weakened, weary, anaemic sun increased,
while rendering it poetical, the sensation of solitude and of finality
that hovered over this spot which savors of human mortality.

"I walked along slowly amid these streets of tombs, where the neighbors
do not visit each other, do not sleep together and do not read the
newspapers. And I began to read the epitaphs. That is the most amusing
thing in the world. Never did Labiche or Meilhac make me laugh as I have
laughed at the comical inscriptions on tombstones. Oh, how much superior
to the books of Paul de Kock for getting rid of the spleen are these
marble slabs and these crosses where the relatives of the deceased have
unburdened their sorrow, their desires for the happiness of the vanished
ones and their hope of rejoining them--humbugs!

"But I love above all in this cemetery the deserted portion, solitary,
full of great yews and cypresses, the older portion, belonging to those
dead long since, and which will soon be taken into use again; the growing
trees nourished by the human corpses cut down in order to bury in rows
beneath little slabs of marble those who have died more recently.

"When I had sauntered about long enough to refresh my mind I felt that I
would soon have had enough of it and that I must place the faithful
homage of my remembrance on my little friend's last resting place. I felt
a tightening of the heart as I reached her grave. Poor dear, she was so
dainty, so loving and so white and fresh--and now--if one
sh