“The sun was bright, the air warm.  I lighted a cigar and sauntered aimlessly along the outer boulevard.  Then, as I strolled on, it occurred to me to walk as far as Montmartre and go into the cemetery.

“I am very fond of cemeteries.  They rest me and give me a feeling of sadness; I need it.  And, besides, I have good friends in there, those that one no longer goes to call on, and I go there from time to time.

“It is in this cemetery of Montmartre that is buried a romance of my life, a sweetheart who made a great impression on me, a very emotional, charming little woman whose memory, although it causes me great sorrow, also fills me with regrets—­regrets of all kinds.  And I go to dream beside her grave.  She has finished with life.

“And then I like cemeteries because they are immense cities filled to overflowing with inhabitants.  Think how many dead people there are in this small space, think of all the generations of Parisians who are housed there forever, veritable troglodytes enclosed in their little vaults, in their little graves covered with a stone or marked by a cross, while living beings take up so much room and make so much noise —­imbeciles that they are!

“Then, again, in cemeteries there are monuments almost as interesting as in museums.  The tomb of Cavaignac reminded me, I must confess without making any comparison, of the chef d’oeuvre of Jean Goujon:  the recumbent statue of Louis de Breze in the subterranean chapel of the Cathedral of Rouen.  All modern and realistic art has originated there, messieurs.  This dead man, Louis de Breze, is more real, more terrible, more like inanimate flesh still convulsed with the death agony than all the tortured corpses that are distorted to-day in funeral monuments.

“But in Montmartre one can yet admire Baudin’s monument, which has a degree of grandeur; that of Gautier, of Murger, on which I saw the other day a simple, paltry wreath of immortelles, yellow immortelles, brought thither by whom?  Possibly by the last grisette, very old and now janitress in the neighborhood.  It is a pretty little statue by Millet, but ruined by dirt and neglect.  Sing of youth, O Murger!

“Well, there I was in Montmartre Cemetery, and was all at once filled with sadness, a sadness that is not all pain, a kind of sadness that makes you think when you are in good health, ’This place is not amusing, but my time has not come yet.’

“The feeling of autumn, of the warm moisture which is redolent of the death of the leaves, and the weakened, weary, anaemic sun increased, while rendering it poetical, the sensation of solitude and of finality that hovered over this spot which savors of human mortality.

“I walked along slowly amid these streets of tombs, where the neighbors do not visit each other, do not sleep together and do not read the newspapers.  And I began to read the epitaphs.  That is the most amusing thing in the world.  Never did Labiche or Meilhac make me laugh as I have laughed at the comical inscriptions on tombstones.  Oh, how much superior to the books of Paul de Kock for getting rid of the spleen are these marble slabs and these crosses where the relatives of the deceased have unburdened their sorrow, their desires for the happiness of the vanished ones and their hope of rejoining them—­humbugs!