The prefect of police was indignant that Monsieur Jacquet had appealed to a minister to avoid the wise delays of the commissioners of the public highways; for the exhumation of Madame Jules was a question belonging to that department.  The police bureau was doing its best to reply promptly to the petition; one appeal was quite sufficient to set the office in motion, and once in motion matters would go far.  But as for the administration, that might take the case before the Council of state,—­a machine very difficult indeed to move.

After the second day Jacquet was obliged to tell his friend that he must renounce his desire, because, in a city where the number of tears shed on black draperies is tariffed, where the laws recognize seven classes of funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is sold at its weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra voices in the Dies irae,—­all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed by the authorities for sorrow is useless and impossible.

“It would have been to me,” said Jules, “a comfort in my misery.  I meant to have died away from here, and I hoped to hold her in my arms in a distant grave.  I did not know that bureaucracy could send its claws into our very coffins.”

He now wished to see if room had been left for him beside his wife.  The two friends went to the cemetery.  When they reached it they found (as at the doors of museums, galleries, and coach-offices) ciceroni, who proposed to guide them through the labyrinth of Pere-Lachaise.  Neither Jules nor Jacquet could have found the spot where Clemence lay.  Ah, frightful anguish!  They went to the lodge to consult the porter of the cemetery.  The dead have a porter, and there are hours when the dead are “not receiving.”  It is necessary to upset all the rules and regulations of the upper and lower police to obtain permission to weep at night, in silence and solitude, over the grave where a loved one lies.  There’s a rule for summer and a rule for winter about this.

Certainly, of all the porters in Paris, the porter of Pere-Lachaise is the luckiest.  In the first place, he has no gate-cord to pull; then, instead of a lodge, he has a house,—­an establishment which is not quite ministerial, although a vast number of persons come under his administration, and a good many employees.  And this governor of the dead has a salary, with emoluments, and acts under powers of which none complain; he plays despot at his ease.  His lodge is not a place of business, though it has departments where the book-keeping of receipts, expenses, and profits, is carried on.  The man is not a suisse, nor a concierge, nor actually a porter.  The gate which admits the dead stands wide open; and though there are monuments and buildings to be cared for, he is not a care-taker.  In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,—­an authority placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all.  Nevertheless, this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,—­that chimerical creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature of reason moving on a thousand paws which are seldom unanimous in motion.