le
who stand at their windows to see how a son deplores a mother as he
follows her body; there are others who hire commodious seats to see how
a head is made to fall. No people in the world have such insatiate eyes
as the Parisians. On this occasion, inquisitive minds were particularly
surprised to see the six lateral chapels at Saint-Roch also hung in
black. Two men in mourning were listening to a mortuary mass said in
each chapel. In the chancel no other persons but Monsieur Desmarets,
the notary, and Jacquet were present; the servants of the household were
outside the screen. To church loungers there was something inexplicable
in so much pomp and so few mourners. But Jules had been determined that
no indifferent persons should be present at the ceremony.

High mass was celebrated with the sombre magnificence of funeral
services. Beside the ministers in ordinary of Saint-Roch, thirteen
priests from other parishes were present. Perhaps never did the _Dies
irae_ produce upon Christians, assembled by chance, by curiosity, and
thirsting for emotions, an effect so profound, so nervously glacial as
that now caused by this hymn when the eight voices of the precentors,
accompanied by the voices of the priests and the choir-boys, intoned it
alternately. From the six lateral chapels twelve other childish voices
rose shrilly in grief, mingling with the choir voices lamentably. From
all parts of the church this mourning issued; cries of anguish responded
to the cries of fear. That terrible music was the voice of sorrows
hidden from the world, of secret friendships weeping for the dead.
Never, in any human religion, have the terrors of the soul, violently
torn from the body and stormily shaken in presence of the fulminating
majesty of God, been rendered with such force. Before that clamor of
clamors all artists and their most passionate compositions must bow
humiliated. No, nothing can stand beside that hymn, which sums all human
passions, gives them a galvanic life beyond the coffin, and leaves them,
palpitating still, before the living and avenging God. These cries of
childhood, mingling with the tones of older voices, including thus in
the Song of Death all human life and its developments, recalling the
sufferings of the cradle, swelling to the griefs of other ages in
the stronger male voices and the quavering of the priests,--all this
strident harmony, big with lightning and thunderbolts, does it not speak
with equal force to