The solemnity of these recollections does not seem to press with much weight upon the minds of the people.  It has been said that the French have become a graver nation than formerly; if so, what must have been their gayety a hundred years ago?  To me they seem as light-hearted and as easily amused as if they had done nothing but make love and quiz their priests since the days of Louis XIV.—­as if their streets had never flowed with the blood of Frenchmen shed by their brethren—­as if they had never won and lost a mighty empire.  I can not imagine the present generation to be less gay than that which listened to the comedies of Moliere at their first representation; particularly when I perceive that even Moliere’s pieces are too much burdened with thought for a Frenchman of the present day, and that he prefers the lighter and more frivolous vaudeville.  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.