Along all the route the folks lifted their hats as the hearse passed by,
and so, through slush and mist and rain, the little company kept
straight toward the barriers, and turned at last into the great gate of
the cemetery of Mt. Parnasse.
They do not deck the cities of the dead abroad as our great sepulchres
are adorned.
Pere la Chaise is famed rather for its inmates than its tombs, and Mont
Parnasse and Monte Martre, the remaining places of interment, are even
forbidding to the mind and the eye.
A gate-keeper, in semi-military dress, sounded a loud bell as the hearse
rolled over the curb, and when they had taken an aisle to the left, with
maple trees on either side, and vistas of mean-looking vaults, a
corpulent priest, wearing a cape and a white apron, and attended by a
civil assistant of most villainous physiognomy, met the cortege and
escorted it to its destination.
This was the _fosse commune_--in plain English, the _common trench_--an
open lot adjacent to the cemetery, appropriated to bodies interred at
public expense, and presenting to the eye a spectacle which, considered
either with regard to its quaintness or its dreariness, stood alone and
unrivalled.
Nearest the street the ground had long been occupied, trench parallel
with trench, filled to the surface level, sodded green, and each grave
marked by a wooden cross.
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