LXX

In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly straight, as far as the eye could see. The thread of snow that marked the outline of its coping gave it a dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left three leafless trees reared their bare black branches against the sky. They rustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead wood stirred by the south wind. Above these trees, behind the wall and close against it, arose the two arms from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. A few snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there; beyond, the hill of Montmartre rose sharply, its white shroud broken by oases of brown earth and sandy patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmounted by gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint in the mist, as far as two black windmills. The sky was of a leaden hue, with occasional cold, bluish streaks as if ink had been applied with a brush! over Montmartre there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seine water after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the wings of an invisible windmill turned and turned⁠—slow-moving wings, unvarying in their movement, which seemed to be turning for eternity.

In front of the wall, against which was planted a thicket of dead cypresses, turned red by the frost, was a vast tract of land upon which were two rows of crowded, jostling overturned crosses, like two great funeral processions. The crosses touched and pushed one another and trod on one another’s heels. They bent and fell and collapsed in the ranks. In the middle there was a sort of congestion which had caused them to bulge out on both sides; you could see them lying⁠—covered by the snow and raising it into mounds with the thick wood of which they were made⁠—upon the paths, somewhat trampled in the centre, that skirted the two long files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation of a multitude, the disorder and wavering course of a long march. The black crosses with their arms outstretched assumed the appearance of ghosts and persons in distress. The two disorderly columns made one think of a human panic, a desperate, frightened army. It was as if one were looking on at a terrible rout.

All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of immortelles, wreaths of white paper with silver thread, black wreaths with gold thread; but you could see them beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things, souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not accept and which had been picked up in order to make a little toilet for the crosses with gleanings from the graves.

All the crosses had a name written in white; but there were other names that were not even written on a piece of wood⁠—a broken branch of a tree, stuck in the ground, with an envelope tied around it⁠—such tombstones as that were to be seen there!

On the left, where they were digging a trench for a third row of crosses, the workman’s shovel threw black dirt into the air, which fell upon the white earth around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of the snow, enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be heard; the dull sound made by the clods of earth and the heavy sound of regular footsteps; an old priest who was waiting there, his head enveloped in a black cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a dirty, yellow surplice, was trying to keep himself warm by stamping his great galoches on the pavement of the high road, in front of the crosses.

Such was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, those crosses and that priest said this: “Here sleeps the Death of the common people; this is the poor man’s end!”

O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city of humanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindly intentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms. The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speak of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors, those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have lengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as a capital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the common people of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to bury them, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, that one can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thy charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals a hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: not the briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God could not be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike against one another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is common to all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfaucon hastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no more time than room to rot in: the earth is taken from them before it has finished with them! before their bones have assumed the color and the ancient appearance, so to speak, of stone, before the passing years have effaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! The excavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they are the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential flies whose sting is deadly!

Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separates the lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Following the directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between the further line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she made her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.

Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out the dates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reached the crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid’s death, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the 9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was not in the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, to the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the 12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in all directions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing⁠—Germinie had been buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in the ground by which to identify her grave!

At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between two crosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10th of November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over her body it was necessary to pray at random between two dates⁠—as if the poor girl’s destiny had decreed that there should be no more room on earth for her body than for her heart!