Their years follow each other like waves; they flow unceasingly,
and though the sound of some is slightly greater and their course
a trifle longer than those of others, they are together confounded
in an abyss where are known neither princes nor kings nor the
proud distinctions of men, as the most boasted rivers mingle in
the ocean, nameless and inglorious with the least known streams."
Is not the Church of Saint-Denis itself a funeral discourse in
stone more grandiose and eloquent than that of the reverend
orator? Regard on either side of the nave these superb mausoleums,
these pompous tombs that are but an empty show, and since their
dead dwell not in them, contemplate these columns that seem to
wish to bear to heaven the splendid testimony of our nothingness!
There, at the right of the main altar, descend the steps that lead
to the crypt. There muse on all the kings, the queens, the
princes, and princesses, whose bones have been replaced at hazard
within these vaults, after their bodies had been, in 1793, cast
into a common ditch in the cemetery of the Valois to be consumed
by quicklime. The great ones of the earth, dispossessed of their
sepulchres, could they not say, in the region of shades, in the
mournful words of the Sermonnaire:--
"Death does not leave us body enough to require room, and it is
only the tombs that claim the sight; our body takes another name;
even that of corpse, since it implies something of the human form,
remains to it but a little time; it becomes a something nameless
in any tongue, so truly does everything die in it, even the
funeral terms by which its unhappy remains are designated.
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