The various tombs are placed without order or regularity:  they are mostly enclosed with trellis work of wood, sometimes by iron railing; and consist of a small marble column, a pyramid, a sarcophagus, or a single slab, just as may have suited the fancy or the taste of the friends of the departed.—­Some surrounded with cypress, some with roses, myrtles, and the choicest exotics; others with evergreens, and not unfrequently a single weeping willow, with the addition of a rose tree!

This intermixture of the sweetest scented flowers and fruit trees, in a burying ground, among the finest pieces of sculptured marble, with evergreens growing over them, in the form of arbours, and furnished with seats, cannot fail to produce in the mind of the person who views it for the first time, peculiar and uncommon feelings of domestic melancholy, mingled with pleasing tenderness.

Who could be otherwise than powerfully affected, as I was, by the first objects that presented themselves to me on entering the place?—­A mother and her two sons, kneeling in pious devotion at the foot of the husband’s and the father’s grave!  At a short distance, a female of elegant form, watering and dressing the earth around some plants at her lover’s tomb!—­not a day, and seldom an hour, passes, but some one is seen either weeping over the remains of a departed relative, or watching with pious solicitude the flowers that spring up around it.

Among the many interesting objects that presented themselves at my first visit, was the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, which had not long since been removed from the convent of the Augustins, where I had seen it in 1815.

At a little distance, to the left of the former, was the burial place of Labedoyere.  The fate of this brave and unfortunate officer is well known; his youth, and misled zeal, have procured him a sympathy which his fellow sufferer Marshal Ney did not find, and did not merit.

In the centre of a square plot of ground enclosed with lattice work, is erected a wooden cross, painted black.  Neither marble, nor stone, nor letters, indicate his name.  Two pots of roses, and a tuft of violets, alone marked the spot, which is carefully weeded.  There is something more affecting in all this simplicity, something, in my mind, that goes more directly home to the heart, than in the most splendid monument or the most studied eulogium.  As we came suddenly up we saw two females clad in deep mourning, weeping over it; at each arm of the cross was suspended a garland of flowers; we were about to retire again immediately, from the fear of disturbing their melancholy devotions, when the concierge, with a brutality indescribable, rushed forward, and removing the garlands, threw them among the shrubs at a considerable distance.  The friend who accompanied me, after searching, recovered one of the garlands, and with more gallantry perhaps than policy, immediately replaced it, and reproaching the keeper with his unmanly conduct, vowed vengeance if he dared to interrupt the ladies, again, when bowing to them we retired.