LITMIR.BIZ

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solemnity, absolutely novel for the greater number of the present generation, offered an aspect at once mournful and imposing. A monarch so justly regretted, a king so truly Christian, coming to take his place among the glorious remains of the martyrs of his race and the bones of his ancestors—profaned, scattered by the revolutionary tempest, but which he had been able again to gather—was a grave subject of reflection, a spectacle touching in its purpose and majestic in the pomp with which it was surrounded."

      Through what vicissitudes had passed these royal tombs, to which the coffin of Louis XVIII. was borne! Read in the work of M. Georges d'Heylli, Les Tombes royales de Saint-Denis, the story of these profanations and restorations.

      The Moniteur of the 6th of February, 1793, published in its literary miscellany, a so-called patriotic ode, by the poet Lebrun, containing the following strophe:—

      "Purgeons le sol des patriotes,

       Par des rois encore infectes.

       La terre de la liberte

       Rejette les os des despotes.

       De ces monstres divinises

       Que tous lea cercueils soient brises!

       Que leur memoirs soit fletrie!

       Et qu'avec leurs manes errants

       Sortent du sein de la patrie

       Les cadavres de ses tyrants!"

      [Footnote: Let us purge the patriot soil—By kings still infected.—The land of liberty—Rejects the bones of despots.—Of these monsters deified—Let all the coffins be destroyed!—Let their memory perish!—And with their wandering manes—Let issue from the bosom of the fatherland—The bodies of its tyrants!]

      These verses were the prelude to the discussion, some months later, in the National Convention, of the proposition to destroy the monuments of the Kings at Saint-Denis, to burn their remains, and to send to the bullet foundry the bronze and lead off their tombs and coffins. In the session of July 31, 1793, Barrere, the "Anacreon of the guillotine," read to the convention in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, a report, which said:—

      "To celebrate the day of August 10, which overthrew the throne, the pompous mausoleums must be destroyed upon its anniversary. Under the Monarchy, the very tombs were taught to flatter kings. Royal pride and luxury could not be moderated even on this theatre of death, and the bearers of the sceptre who had brought such ills on France and on humanity seemed even in the grave to vaunt a vanished splendor. The strong hand of the Republic should pitilessly efface these haughty epitaphs, and demolish these mausoleums which might recall the frightful memory of kings."

      The project was voted by acclamation. The tombs were demolished between the 6th and 8th of August, 1793, and the announcement was made for the anniversary of the 10th of August, 1792, of "that grand, just, and retributive destruction, required in order that the coffins should be opened, and the remains of the tyrants be thrown into a ditch filled with quick-time, where they may be forever destroyed. This operation will shortly take place."

      This was done in the following October. For some days there was carried on a profanation even more sacrilegious than the demolition of the tombs. The coffins containing the remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, were violated. On Wednesday, the 16th of October, 1798, at the very hour that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold—she who had so wept for her son, the first Dauphin, who died the 4th of June, 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution—the disinterrers of kings violated the grave of this child and threw his bones on the refuse heap. Iconoclasts, jealous of death, disputed its prey, and they profaned among others the sepulchres of Madame Henrietta of England, of the Princess Palatine, of the Regent, and of Louis XV.

      In the midst of these devastations, some men, less insensate than the others, sought at least to rescue from the hands of the destroyers what might be preserved in the interest of art. Of this number was an artist, Alexandre Lenoir, who had supervised the demolition of the tombs of Saint-Denis. He could not keep from the foundry, by the terms of the decree, the tombs of lead, copper, and bronze; but he saved the others from complete destruction—those that may be seen to-day in the church of Saint-Denis. He had them placed first in the cemetery of the Valois, near the ditches filled with quicklime, where had been cast the remains of the great ones of the earth, robbed of their sepulchres. Later, a decree of the Minister of the Interior, Benezech, dated 19 Germinal, An IV., authorizing the citizen Lenoir to have the tombs thus saved from destruction taken to the Museum of French Monuments, of which he was the conservator, and which had been installed at Paris, Rue des Petits Augustins. From thence they were destined to be returned to the Church of Saint-Denis, under the reign of Louis XVIII.

      At the height of his power, Napoleon dreamed of providing for himself the same sepulture as that of the kings, his predecessors. He had decided that he would be interred in the Church of Saint-Denis, and had arranged for himself a cortege of emperors about the site that he had chosen for the vault of his dynasty. He directed the construction of a grand monument dedicated to Charlemagne, which was to rise in the "imperialized" church. The great Carlovingian emperor was to have been represented, erect, upon a column of marble, at the back of which statues in stone of the emperors who succeeded him were to have been placed. But at the time of Napoleon's fall, the monument had not been finished. There had been completed only the statues, which have taken their rank in the crypt. They represent Charlemagne, Louis le Debonnaire, Charles le Chauve, Louis le Begue, Charles le Gros, and even Louis d'Outremer, who, nevertheless, was only a king.

      Like the Pharaohs of whom Bossuet speaks, Napoleon was not to enjoy his sepulture. To be interred with pomp at Saint-Denis, while Napoleon, at Saint Helena, rested under a simple stone on which not even his name was inscribed, was the last triumph for Louis XVIII.—a triumph in death. The re-entrance of Louis XVIII. had been not only the restoration of the throne, but that of the tombs. The 21st of January, 1815, twenty-two years, to the very day, after the death of Louis XVI., the remains of the unhappy King and those of his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were transferred to the Church of Saint-Denis, where their solemn obsequies were celebrated. Chateaubriand cried:—

      "What hand has reconstructed the roof of these vaults and prepared these empty tombs? The hand of him who was seated on the throne of the Bourbons. O Providence! He believed that he was preparing the sepulchres of his race, and he was but building the tomb of Louis XVI. Injustice reigns but for a moment; it is virtue only that can count its ancestors and leave a posterity. See, at the same moment, the master of the earth falls, Louis XVIII. regains the sceptre, Louis XVI. finds again the sepulture of his fathers."

      At the beginning of the Second Restoration, the King determined, by a decree of the 4th of April, 1816, that search should be made in the cemetery of the Valois, about the Church of Saint-Denis, in order to recover the remains of his ancestors that might have escaped the action of the bed of quicklime, in which they had been buried under the Terror. The same decree declared that the remains recovered should be solemnly replaced in the Church of Saint-Denis.

      Excavations were made in January, 1817, in the cemetery of the Valois, and the bones thus discovered were transferred to the necropolis of the kings.

      "It was night," says Alexandre Lenoir, in his Histoire des Arts en France par les Monuments. "The moon shone on the towers; the torches borne by the attendants were reflected from the walls of the edifice. What a spectacle! The remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, of the most ancient of monarchies, sought with pious care, with sacred respect, in the ditches dug by impious arms in the evil days. The bones of the Valois and the Bourbons found pele-mele outside the walls of the church, and brought again, after a long exile, to their ancient burial place."

      In a little vault on the left were deposited the coffins containing the bones of earlier date than the Bourbons, and a marble tablet was placed upon it, with the inscription: "Here rest the mortal remains of eighteen kings, from Dagobert to Henry III.; ten queens, from Nantilde, wife of Dagobert, to Marguerite de Valois, first wife of Henry IV.; twenty-four dauphins, princes, and princesses, children and grandchildren of France; eleven divers personages (Hugues-le-grand, four abbes of Saint-Denis, three chamberlains, two constables, and Sedille de Sainte-Croix, wife of the Counsellor

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