eums, these pompous tombs
that are but an empty show, and since their dead dwell not in them,
contemplate these columns that seem to wish to bear to heaven the
splendid testimony of our nothingness! There, at the right of the main
altar, descend the steps that lead to the crypt. There muse on all the
kings, the queens, the princes, and princesses, whose bones have been
replaced at hazard within these vaults, after their bodies had been, in
1793, cast into a common ditch in the cemetery of the Valois to be
consumed by quicklime. The great ones of the earth, dispossessed of
their sepulchres, could they not say, in the region of shades, in the
mournful words of the Sermonnaire:--

"Death does not leave us body enough to require room, and it is only
the tombs that claim the sight; our body takes another name; even that
of corpse, since it implies something of the human form, remains to it
but a little time; it becomes a something nameless in any tongue, so
truly does everything die in it, even the funeral terms by which its
unhappy remains are designated. Thus the Power divine, justly angered
by our pride, reduces it to nothingness, and, to level all conditions
forever, makes common ashes of us all."

The remains of so many sovereigns and princes are no longer even
corpses. The corpses have perished as ruins perish. You may no longer
see the coffins of the predecessors of Louis XVI. But those of the
Martyr-King, of the Queen Marie Antoinette, of the Duke of Berry, of
Louis XVIII., are there before you in the crypt. Pause. Here is the
royal vault of the Bourbons. Your glance can enter only a narrow grated
window, through which a little twilight filters. If a lamp were not
lighted at the back, the eye would distinguish nothing. By the doubtful
gleam of this sepulchral lamp, you succeed in making out in the gloom
the coffins placed on trestles of iron; to the left that of the Duke of
Berry, then the two little coffins of his children, dead at birth; then
in two rows those of Mesdames Adelaide and Victoire, daughters of Louis
XV., those of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, those of the two last
Princes of Conde, died in 1818 and in 1830, and on the right, at the
very extremity of the vault, that of the only sovereign who, for the
period of a century, died upon the throne, Louis XVIII.

The royal vault of the Bourbons was diminished more than half to make
room for the imperial vault constructed under Napoleon III. The former
e