confession. Desirous, as it would
appear, of leaving this world like the rest of his worthy _comperes_,
the composer Rameau cried furiously to his confessor, whose lugubrious
note while intoning the service at his bedside offended the delicacy of
his ear, 'What the devil are you muttering there, Monsieur le Cure? you
are horribly out of tune!' And thereupon Master Rameau expired of a
putrid fever. And what think you, worthy reader, occupied the public the
day following the death of the most celebrated musician in Europe, the
king of the French school? Why, nothing less than this wonderful piece
of news: "Mademoiselle Mire, of the Opera, more celebrated as a
courtesan than as a _danseuse_, has interred her lover; on his tomb are
engraven these words:

MI RE LA MI LA."

A touching funeral oration, truly, for poor Rameau! Panard, the father
of the French vaudeville, died some days after Rameau; and the Parisian
public, with its national tenderness of heart, merely remarked, that
"the words could not be separated from the accompaniment."

You see, reader, how the ranks were thinning, how all these old candles
were expiring in their sockets, how the ball was approaching its end.

"Piron died yesterday," writes a journalist; and he adds, "They say he
received the cure of St. Roche very badly." What an admirable piece of
buffoonery! these cures going in turn to shrive the writers of the
eighteenth century, and having flung at their heads epigrams composed
for the occasion, perhaps, ten years before.

Louis XV. died soon after Piron. A few hours before his death he said to
Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon: "Although the king is answerable to God
alone for his conduct, you can say that he is sorry for having caused
any scandal to his subjects, and that from henceforth he desires to live
but for the support of faith and religion, and for the happiness of his
people!"

Like Rameau, Piron, Helvetius, and Pompadour, this good little king
Louis XV. must have his _bon mot_; he was sorry for having caused any
scandal to his subjects, and at his last moment of existence would live
from henceforth for the sole happiness of his people! "Can any thing be
finer than this?"

Finally came the Abbe de Voisenon's turn. Witty to his last hour, when
they brought home the leaden coffin, the exact form and dimensions of
which he had himself arranged and ordered beforehand, he said to one of
his domestics,--

"There is a great-coat, any how