108 CHURCH GARDENS AND CEMETERIES. ^ 



there is a quiet verdure wMcli makes the spot sweet to look 

 upon j but with the cemeteries of Paris it is very different. 

 There human love is lavish in its testimony^ but the result 

 is ghastly to behold. The quantity of everlasting flowers 

 or immortelles^ that is there woven into wreaths^ for placing 

 on and about the tombs in the cemeteries^, is something 

 astounding. Next to seeing the contents of a hundred 

 Morgues displayed^ the great spread of decaying everlastings 

 is the most ghastly sight. They hang them on the poor 

 little wooden crosses^ they pile them inside on the covered 

 tombsj they stick them on the few green bushes^ they sling 

 them under little spans of glass placed purposely over many 

 tombs to protect the immortelles from the weather, till in 

 every part^ and particularly the part where the second and 

 thii'd-class departed are buried, there is scarcely anything to 

 be seen but everlastings in every stage of decay, the sight 

 being most depressing to anybody used to green British 

 churchyards. A considerable portion of each large Parisian 

 cemetery seems made to be inhabited by ghouls. In addi- 

 tion to decomposing compositse, there is no end of small 

 crockeryware art, and countless little objects made in bead- 

 work, and brought here by the survivors of the dead to hang 

 on the little black crosses or tombs. 



It is somewhat different in the portions devoted to the 

 graves of those who could command money when they 

 moved about on the surface, and such as passed on their 

 w^ay to the grave by the paths of fame or glory. In their 

 case, a little chapel, a ponderous tomb, or something of the 

 kind, usually protects for a little time the dust of particular 

 individuals from mingling with the common clay of their 

 poorer relatives, and affords shelter to the crosses of silver 

 and little objects of art, and a little more permanence to 

 the wreaths. But what a very wide difference between this 

 portion and that in which the ground is not paid for in per- 

 petuity ! Here the dust is allowed to lie undisturbed, at 

 all events till they want to make a railway through it, or 

 the gardening taste of a future age directs the surface to 

 be levelled and planted with horrid taste, as a garden, as has 

 been recently done in several cases in London, so that the 



