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. There was a double layer of bodies[Pg 38] beneath, lying side by side; no margin could of course be given at the surface; the thickly planted crosses, therefore, looked, at a little distance, like a great waste of heath or bramble, broken now and then by a dwarf cedar, and hung to the full with flowers and tokens. The width of the trenches was that of the added height of two full-grown men, and the length a half mile perhaps; a narrow passage-way separated them, so that, however undistinguishable they appeared, each grave could be indentified and visited.

[Pg 38]

Close observation might have found much to cheer this waste of flesh, this economy of space; but to this little approaching company the scene was of a kind to make death more terrible by association.

A rough wall enclosed the flat expanse of charnel, over which the scattered houses of the barriers looked widowed through their mournful windows; and now and then a crippled crone, or a bereaved old pauper, hobbled to the roadway and shook her white hairs to the rain.

It seemed a long way over the boggy soil to the newly opened trench, where the hearse stopped with its wheels half-sunken, and the chief croquemort, without any ado, threw the coffin over his shoulder and walked to the place of sepulture. Five fossoyeurs, at the remote end of the trench, were digging and covering, as if their number rather than their work needed increase, and a soldier in blue overcoat, whose hands were full of papers, came up at a commercial pace, and cried:

"Corps trente-deux!"

Which corresponded to the figures on the box, and to the number of interments for the day.[Pg 39]

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