PARK AND CEMETERY 
465 
incite the people to devotion.” The artist is supposed 
to have been one Jehan d’Orleans, valet and painter 
in ordinary to Charles VI. According to a contempor- 
ary record, the work was begun in August, 1424, and 
finished in the following Lent. The Dance at Bale 
was not executed till 1439, and Holbein — to whom it 
has been attributed — was not born till 1498. That old 
Paris has long since disappeared, the only illustrations 
of it known are found in a book in the library of the 
city of Grenable, printed by Guy Marchant at Pai'is 
in 1485, and in which the skeleton figures of Death 
seem grotesque rather than awe-inspiring in our mod- 
ern eyes. 
A more imposing figure of the Cainard, the flat- 
nosed, the death’s head, — is the small alabaster statue, 
formerly known as the Mort Saint-Innocent, which 
stood under the fifth arcade, when issuing from the 
church, in the charnier of Messieurs les Martins, and 
had been executed by their order. It was kept en- 
closed in a box, of which the church wardens had the 
key, and on All Saints’ Day it was exhibited to the peo- 
ple until noon of the next day. It is now preserved 
in the museum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It repre- 
sents a corpse in the process of dissolution, standing 
upright, with a menacing expression, holding in the 
right hand the folds of a shroud or winding sheet, 
while the left rests on the top of a shield on which is 
engraved a quatrain, indicated by a dart formerly held 
between the fingers of the left hand, and which may 
be translated : “There is none living, however artful 
or strong to resist, that I do not strike with my dart, 
to give to the worms their share.” Formerly attrib- 
uted to the sculptor Germain Pilon, this statue is now 
thought to be older, and to have been executed by 
Francois Gentil, a native of Froyes. Another of the 
famous monuments of the cemetery was that known as 
the Croix Gastines, attributed to Jean Goujon; and 
when the cemetery was finally suppressed, in 1786, and 
the bones transferred to the catacombs, this cross was 
also transported to that locality and set up at the 
entrance, at the locality known as the Tombe-Issoire. 
Still another was an isolated cell, set up in the middle 
of the cemetery, just large enough to contain a person 
standing upright, which had been constructed by a 
recluse named Jeanne La A^alliere, and in which she 
was voluntarily walled up by the Bishop of Paris, in 
the presence of a multitude of persons, on the nth of 
October, 1442. Here she remained for a number of 
years, receiving air and food through a small grating. 
After her death, her place was taken by another, Alix, 
called La Bougote, who, it is related, lived so sancti- 
I fied a life in her cell that, after her death, June 29, 
I 1466, Louis XI. erected in her honor a marble tomb 
supported by four copper lions. Still a third was an 
involuntary recluse, Renee de Vendomois, accused of 
the murder of her husband, Margueritte de Saint- 
Barthelemy, Seigneur de Souldai, and condemned to 
death ; the king gave her a respite, and the Parliament 
condemned her to be perpetually enclosed in a petite 
maison, to be built at her expense in the cemetery of 
the Saints-Innocents. 
CLOISTERS OF CHURCH DES INNOCENTS. 
Showing upper portions containing human skulls and the 
frescoes of the “Danse Macabre.” From Paris Known and 
Unknown, George Barrie & Sons, Philadelphia. 
Notwithstanding these gruesome witnesses and as- 
sociations, the character of the enclosure, and the fact 
that it was used as a place of deposit for refuse and 
ordure of every kind by all the surrounding neighbor- 
hood, the cemetery was the favorite place of resort 
for the inhabitants, for dances and festivals, and, at 
night, for debauchery and prostitution. As it was the 
place of burial for several parishes it was thronged 
by both the living and the dead ; in the centre was a 
lantern, mounted on a pillar of masonry some five 
metres in height, and which at night diffused an un- 
certain light over both. The burials were to the num- 
ber of two or three thousand a year ; it was estimated 
that in the course of six centuries they had amounted 
to one million, two hundred thousand, in a space of 
about nine thousand, six hundred square feet. In 
1780, when a commission was appointed to consider 
the advisability of closing the cemetery, the guardian 
in charge, one Maitre Poutrain, — qualified by the com- 
mission itself as “a drunkard,” — testified that during 
his incumbency the soil had risen to such an extent 
that a square tomb near the church, then only about 
three feet high, had been originally just within reach 
of his outstretched hands, he standing on his toes. 
This commission owed its origin to an incident which 
occurred in July of this year, 1780, — a shoemaker of 
the Rue de la Lingerie, which ran along one side of 
the cemetery, having gone down into his cellar for a 
side of leather, was driven back by an insupportable 
