"tingle!"
Did he see the fifteen francs at all, half trance-like, half corpse-like, as he stood, waiting for the third revolution, and waiting again, and again, and again?
His five francs have grown to be a hundred; his cold hand falls freezingly upon them; five francs replace the hundred he took away—"Whizz!" goes the ball; "click!" stops the ball; the coupeur seizes Mr. Risque's five francs, and Mr. Risque walks away like a somnambulist.
V.
BURIED IN THE COMMON DITCH.
It would have been a strange scene for an American public, the street corridor of the lofty house near the church of Saint Sulpice, on the funeral afternoon.
The coffin lay upon a draped table, and festoons of crape threw phantom shadows upon the soiled velvet covering. Each passing pedestrian and cabman took off his hat a moment. The Southern Colony were in the landlady's bureau enjoying a lunch and liquor, and precisely at three o'clock they came down stairs, not more dilapidated than usual, while at the same moment the municipal hearse drove up, attended by one cocher and two croquemorts.[D]
[D] Literally, "parasites of death."
The hearse was a cheap charity affair, furnished by the Maire of the arrondissement, though it was sprucely painted and decked with funeral cloth. The driver wore a huge black chapeau, a white cotton cravat, and thigh-boots, which, standing up stiffly as he sat, seemed to engulf him to the ears.
When the croquemorts, in a business way, lifted the velvet from the coffin, it was seen to be constructed of strips of deal merely, unpainted, and not thicker than a Malaga raisin box.
There was some fear that it would fall apart of its own fragility, but the chief croquemort explained politely that such accidents never happened.
"We have entombed four of them to-day," he said; "see how nicely we shall lift the fifth one."
There was, indeed, a certain sleight whereby he slung it across his shoulder, but no reason in the world for tossing it upon the hearse with a slam. They covered its nakedness with velvet, and the cocher, having taken a cigar from his pocket, and looking much as if he would like to smoke, put it back again sadly, cracked his whip, and the cortege went on. The croquemorts kept a little way ahead, sauntering upon the sidewalk, and their cloaks and oil-cloth hats protected them from a drizzling rain, which now came down, to the grief of the mourners, walking in the middle of the street behind the body. They were seven in number, Messrs. Plade, Pisgah and Simp, going together, and apparently a trifle the worse for the lunch; Freckle followed singly, having been told to keep at a distance to render the display more imposing; the landlady and her niece went arm in arm after, and behind them trode a little old hunchback gentleman, neatly clothed, and bearing in his hand a black, wooden cross, considerably higher than himself, on which was painted, in white letters, this inscription:
CHRISTOPHER LEES,
CAROLINA DU NORD,
ÉTATS CONFÉDÉRE
AMERIQUE.
AGE VINGT-QUATRE.
A wreath of yellow immortelles, tied to the crosspiece, was interwoven with these spangled letters:
"R-E-G-R-E-T-S;"
and the solemn air of the old man seemed to evidence that they were not meaningless.
The hunchback was Lees' principal creditor. He kept a small restaurant, where the deceased had been supplied for two years, and his books showed indebtedness of twenty-eight hundred francs, not a sou of which he should ever receive. He could ill afford to lose the money, and had known, indeed, that he should never be paid, a year previous to the demise. But the friendlessness of the stranger had touched his heart. Twice every day he sent up a basket of food, which was always returned empty, and every Sunday climbed the long stairway with a bottle of the best wine—but never once said, "Pay my bill."
Here he was at the last chapter of exile, still bearing his creditor's cross.
"Give the young man's friends a lunch," he had said to the landlady: "I will make it right;"—and in the cortege he was probably the only honest mourner.
Not we, who know Frenchmen by caricature merely, as volatile, fickle, deceitful, full of artifice, should sit in judgment upon them. He has the least heart of all who thinks that there is not some heart everywhere! The charity which tarrieth long and suffereth much wrong, has been that of the Parisians of the Latin Quarter, during the American war.
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.
Père 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. There was a double layer of bodies 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.
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
