of which the coffin containing the body of the deceased was slowly carried up the middle of the nave...As soon as the coffin was placed in the mausoleum, Mozart’s Requiem was begun...The march that accompanied the body to the mausoleum was Chopin’s own composition from his first pianoforte sonata, instrumented for the orchestra by M. Henri Reber.

[Footnote:  Op. 35, the first of those then published, but in reality his second, Op. 4 being the first.  Meyerbeer afterwards expressed to M. Charles Gavard his surprise that he had not been asked to do the deceased the homage of scoring the march.]

During the ceremony M. Lefebure-Wely, organist of the Madeleine, performed two of Chopin’s preludes [footnote:  Nos. 4 and 6, in E and B minor] upon the organ...After the service M. Wely played a voluntary, introducing themes from Chopin’s compositions, while the crowd dispersed with decorous gravity.  The coffin was then carried from the church, all along the Boulevards, to the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise-a distance of three miles at least—­Meyerbeer and the other chief mourners, who held the cords, walking on foot, bareheaded.

[Footnote:  Liszt writes that Meyerbeer and Prince Adam Czartoryski conducted the funeral procession, and that Prince Alexander Czartoryski, Delacroix, Franchomme, and Gutmann were the pall-bearers.  Karasowski mentions the same gentlemen as pall-bearers; Madame Audley, on the other hand, names Meyerbeer instead of Gutmann.  Lastly, Theophile Gautier reported in the Feuilleton de la Presse of November 5, 1849, that mm.  Meyerbeer, Eugene Delacroix, Franchomme, and Pleyel held the cords of the pall.  The Gazette musicale mentions Franchomme, Delacroix, Meyerbeer, and Czartoryski.]

  A vast number of carriages followed...

[Footnote:  “Un grand nombre de voitures de deuil et de voitures particulieres,” we read in the Gazette musicals, “ont suivi jusqu’au cimetiere de l’Est, dit du Pere-Lachaise, le pompeux corbillard qui portait le corps du defunt.  L’elite des artistes de Paris lui a servi de cortege.  Plusieurs dames, ses eleves, en grand deuil, ont suivi le convoi, a pied, jusqu’au champ de repos, ou l’artiste eminent, convaincu, a eu pour oraisons funebres des regrets muets, profondement sentis, qui valent mieux que des discours dans lesquels perce toujours une vanite d’auteur ou d’orateur”]

At Pere-Lachaise, in one of the most secluded spots, near the tombs of Habeneck and Marie Milanollo, the coffin was deposited in a newly-made grave.  The friends and admirers took a last look, ladies in deep mourning threw garlands and flowers upon the coffin, and then the gravedigger resumed his work...The ceremony was performed in silence.

One affecting circumstance escaped the attention of our otherwise so acute observer—­namely, the sprinkling on the coffin, when the latter had been lowered into the grave, of the Polish earth which, enclosed in a finely-wrought silver cup, loving friends had nearly nineteen years before, in the village of Wola, near Warsaw, given to the departing young and hopeful musician who was never to see his country again.