century-old cemeteries, was
peculiar to Paris, and began with the Cimetiere des Innocents at an
unknown date. The word seems to have first been used in France in the
eleventh century;--the historian, Raoul Glaber, quoted in MM.
Firmin-Didot's important work on Paris, previously cited, tells us that
after a terrible famine, "as it was no longer possible to inter each
body separately because of their great number, the pious people who
feared God constructed in divers localities charniers, in which were
deposited more than five hundred corpses." A dictionary of architecture,
published in Paris in 1770, defines the word as meaning a "gallery or
portico, formerly constructed around the parish cemeteries, in which
the catechism is taught, and in the lofts of which are stored the
fleshless bones of the dead. They may be found in several parishes of
Paris." Their use was not entirely discontinued till the close of the
last century. A pious regard for the relics of the departed led to the
search for some honorable place in which to store this constantly
increasing multitude of skeletons; sheds or penthouses were used,
chapels, the lofts of cloisters and churches. In Paris there were six
important churches, the cemeteries of which were surrounded by extensive
galleries, lit by rich windows and ornamented with elaborate funerary
monuments, and eight other parishes of minor importance; one of the
latest built of these, that of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, prided itself on
having its steeple and its charnier in miniature. The two most important
were that of the Innocents, the popular cemetery, and that of
Saint-Paul, the aristocratic one.

To the accidental and isolated places of storage in the former succeeded
a series of symmetrical constructions, built independently of each
other, yet rapidly succeeding one another, and apparently all by funds
proceeding from pious legacies and donations in the fourteenth century.
These different galleries enclosed from twenty to twenty-five arcades
each, and were largely open to the air, so that their ghastly contents
were plainly visible. Some of them, it is thought, had no roofs, or very
imperfect ones. Notwithstanding these charnel-houses and the reeking
soil of the cemetery itself, a deposit for refuse and offal of every
description, this locality was one of the most thronged in the mediaeval
city. The present Halles Centrales and the Marche des Innocents, which
occupied the same site from 1785,