Thus
the Power divine, justly angered by our pride, reduces it to
nothingness, and, to level all conditions forever, makes common
ashes of us all."
The remains of so many sovereigns and princes are no longer even
corpses. The corpses have perished as ruins perish. You may no
longer see the coffins of the predecessors of Louis XVI. But those
of the Martyr-King, of the Queen Marie Antoinette, of the Duke of
Berry, of Louis XVIII., are there before you in the crypt. Pause.
Here is the royal vault of the Bourbons. Your glance can enter
only a narrow grated window, through which a little twilight
filters. If a lamp were not lighted at the back, the eye would
distinguish nothing. By the doubtful gleam of this sepulchral
lamp, you succeed in making out in the gloom the coffins placed on
trestles of iron; to the left that of the Duke of Berry, then the
two little coffins of his children, dead at birth; then in two
rows those of Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, daughters of Louis
XV., those of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, those of the two
last Princes of Conde, died in 1818 and in 1830, and on the right,
at the very extremity of the vault, that of the only sovereign
who, for the period of a century, died upon the throne, Louis
XVIII.
The royal vault of the Bourbons was diminished more than half to
make room for the imperial vault constructed under Napoleon III.
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