ld, well-known
graves, he inspected with great interest the monuments erected since
his residence in Paris--of Musset, Rossini, Michelet, Regnault,
Countess d'Agoult and other celebrities. From Pere la Chaise he drove
to the cemetery of Montmartre, where he merely wished to place a wreath
of immortelles on Heine's grave. But once there, he could not go away
without looking about the place a little.

He strolled slowly along the streets of graves, in which, amid
commonplace stone slabs and insignificant iron crosses, stately
monuments rose at brief intervals, though they rarely bore inscribed on
their fronts a name of sufficient distinction to afford a justification
for attracting the attention of the wanderer; while as a rule they were
only memorials of the vanity extending beyond the grave of the poor
obscure mortal whose ashes they sheltered.

The graves were adorned in various ways for the great festival of the
dead. The narrow walks around them were strewn with fresh yellow
gravel and river sand; pots of blossoming plants stood on the slabs and
at the foot of the crosses; on the arms of the latter hung garlands of
evergreen and yellow or red immortelles, but also the ugly wreaths of
painted plaster and glass beads with affected inscriptions, which
dishonour Parisian industry. Beside these mounds, where the work of a
loving hand was apparent, and whose dead were evidently united by
filaments of love to a tender human being still breathing in the
sunshine, forsaken and neglected ones often appeared, on which only a
few rain-soaked, decaying leaves of paper wreaths were mouldering,
where moss and weeds grew rankly, and in which lay dead for whom no one
grieved, and who were now remembered by none in the world of the
living. But how speedily one is forgotten in Paris. How soon the
ocean of the world's capital swallows up, not only a human being, but
his family, all his friends and acquaintances, and even his memory! A
chill ran down Rudolf's spine as he pondered over the melancholy
thought of living and dying in Paris as a stranger.

As he drifted aimlessly on with the flowing human stream, he suddenly
found himself in a narrow side-path before a monument surrounded by a
specially dense throng. Several rows of people, principally workmen
and their wives, were standing around it, those behind thrusting their
heads over the shoulders of the front ranks, the new arrivals pressing
impatiently upon those who had t