Jacquet and Monsieur Desmarets
took the thirteenth; the servants followed on foot. An hour later, they
were at the summit of that cemetery popularly called Pere-Lachaise. The
unknown twelve men stood in a circle round the grave, where the coffin
had been laid in presence of a crowd of loiterers gathered from all
parts of this public garden. After a few short prayers the priest threw
a handful of earth on the remains of this woman, and the grave-diggers,
having asked for their fee, made haste to fill the grave in order to dig
another.

Here this history seems to end; but perhaps it would be incomplete if,
after giving a rapid sketch of Parisian life, and following certain of
its capricious undulations, the effects of death were omitted. Death in
Paris is unlike death in any other capital; few persons know the trials
of true grief in its struggle with civilization, and the government of
Paris. Perhaps, also, Monsieur Jules and Ferragus XXIII. may have proved
sufficiently interesting to make a few words on their after life not
entirely out of place. Besides, some persons like to be told all, and
wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to know by what
chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin's lamp.

Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was brought
that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was necessary to
employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a man so crushed
that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was also necessary to
coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature of the request,
which was done in these words: "The petitioner respectfully asks for the
incineration of his wife."

When the official charged with making the report to the Councillor of
State and prefect of police read that marginal note, explaining the
object of the petition, and couched, as requested, in the plainest
terms, he said:--

"This is a serious matter! my report cannot be ready under eight days."

Jules, to whom Jacquet was obliged to speak of this delay, comprehended
the words that Ferragus had said in his hearing, "I'll burn Paris!"
Nothing seemed to him now more natural than to annihilate that
receptacle of monstrous things.

"But," he said to Jacquet,