han that of paying ones. The city pays one
dollar to the company for each pauper funeral. The mass of material
possessed by the company is very great, comprising six hundred vehicles
of all kinds, three hundred horses, six thousand biers or stretchers,
and a vast number of draperies, cushions, torches, etc. Over five
hundred and seventy-five men are employed by this organization. Thanks
to these ample arrangements, the terrible spectacle afforded during the
cholera outbreaks of 1832 and 1849, when the dead were conveyed to the
cemeteries piled in upholsterers' wagons, is not likely to be renewed,
as during the exceptional mortality from the same cause in 1854 and 1865
the arrangements were found to suffice for all demands.

In olden times Paris was full of cemeteries: they were attached to every
hospital and every church. The wealthy were interred in the churches
themselves: in the church of Les Innocents, which was specially affected
by the nobility, the aisles were often crowded with coffins awaiting
their turn to be placed in the overcrowded vaults. Nobody troubled
himself about the sanitary side of the question in those days, as
witness the cemetery of Saint Roch, which in 1763 was established beside
one of the city wells. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
cemeteries were popular places of resort. Les Innocents was especially
popular: it was surrounded by arcades, where booths and stores were
established, and people came there to promenade and to amuse themselves.
Nor were private cemeteries unknown, many prominent Jewish and
Protestant families being privileged to inter their dead (to whom the
Church denied burial in consecrated ground) in the gardens attached to
their houses. Thus, when the work of reconstructing Paris under the
Second Empire was begun, the enormous quantity of graves that were
discovered filled the workers with amaze. The bones thus found were at
first transferred to the Western Cemetery, which had been closed for
over twenty years, but the accumulation speedily became unmanageable,
and when a mass of over three thousand square feet of bones had been
deposited there, a decree of the authorities caused the whole and all
similar discoveries to be deposited in the catacombs.

The Revolution did away with the greater part of the intramural
cemeteries by suppressing those attached to the churches and declaring
the ground to be national property: they were consequently parceled out
into