The
Parisian Has His Amusements As Regularly As His Meals, The Theatre, Music,
The Dance, A Walk In The Tuilleries, A Refection In The Cafe, To Which
Ladies Resort As Commonly As The Other Sex.
Perpetual business, perpetual
labor, is a thing of which he seems to have no idea.
I wake in the middle
of the night, and I hear the fiddle going, and the sound of feet keeping
time, in some of the dependencies of the large building near the
Tuilleries, in which I have my lodgings.
When a generation of Frenchmen
"Have played, and laughed, and danced, and drank their fill" -
when they have seen their allotted number of vaudevilles and swallowed
their destined allowance of weak wine and bottled small-beer, they are
swept off to the cemetery of Montmartre, or of Pere la Chaise, or some
other of the great burial-places which lie just without the city. I went
to visit the latter of these the other day. You are reminded of your
approach to it by the rows of stone-cutters' shops on each side of the
street, with a glittering display of polished marble monuments. The place
of the dead is almost a gayer-looking spot than the ordinary haunts of
Parisian life. It is traversed with shady walks of elms and limes, and its
inmates lie amidst thickets of ornamental shrubs and plantations of the
most gaudy flowers. Their monuments are hung with wreaths of artificial
flowers, or of those natural ones which do not lose their color and shape
in drying, like the amaranth and the ever-lasting. Parts of the cemetery
seem like a city in miniature; the sepulchral chapels, through the windows
of which you see crucifixes and tapers, stand close to each other beside
the path, intermingled with statues and busts.
There is one part of this repository of the dead which is little visited,
that in which the poor are buried, where those who have dwelt apart from
their more fortunate fellow-creatures in life lie apart in death. Here are
no walks, no shade of trees, no planted shrubbery, but ridges of raw
earth, and tufts of coarse herbage show where the bodies are thrown
together under a thin covering of soil. I was about to walk over the spot,
but was repelled by the sickening exhalations that rose from it.
Letter II.
A Journey to Florence.
Florence, _Sept_ 27, 1834.
I have now been in this city a fortnight, and have established myself in a
suite of apartments lately occupied, as the landlord told me, in hopes I
presume of getting a higher rent, by a Russian prince. The Arno flows, or
rather stands still, under my windows, for the water is low, and near the
western wall of the city is frugally dammed up to preserve it for the
public baths. Beyond, this stream so renowned in history and poetry, is at
this season but a feeble rill, almost lost among the pebbles of its bed,
and scarcely sufficing to give drink to the pheasants and hares of the
Grand Duke's Cascine on its banks.
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