he heard that his old one was to be suppressed. It was not
suppressed, however, till six years later, and in 1785 we find another
commission from the Academie des Sciences taking testimony and adopting
the recommendations of the grave-digger Poutrain as though he had been a
member of their own learned body. They even accepted this statement from
him:--there was a square tomb in the cemetery, near the church, then
only some three feet high, and which, when he commenced his labors in
the grounds, had been so high that he could scarcely reach the top with
his hands. That the soil had risen, however, cannot be doubted. There
were two thousand or three thousand burials a year; Poutrain said he had
officiated at ninety thousand himself during his term of office; and M.
Hericart de Thury has estimated the number of inhumations in the course
of six centuries as high as one million two hundred thousand. This has
even been considered as below the probable number, on a basis of three
thousand a year, and not allowing for famines, pestilences, epidemics,
and wars,--all in a space estimated at nine thousand six hundred square
feet.

Another account says that the cemetery was closed on the 1st of
December, 1780, in consequence of the following incident: In July of
that year, a shoemaker of the Rue de la Lingerie, having occasion to go
down into his cellar to get some leather, was driven back by an
insupportable odor. His neighbors having been called in and due
investigation made, it was discovered that the foundation wall had
yielded to the pressure of the earth of the cemetery, and that the
cellar was half full of decomposing bodies, mostly from a trench that
had been opened on that side of the grounds in the latter part of the
preceding year, for the reception of some two thousand corpses. The
police forbade the gazettes and journals to give any publicity to this
incident, and a commission was appointed to investigate. A decree of the
Archbishop of Paris, June 10, 1786, definitely closed the cemetery, the
earth was screened, the bones placed in sacks and transported in covered
carts to the old quarries under the plain of Montsouris in the locality
called the Tombe-Issoire, as has been stated. Those which it had been
intended to transport to the cemetery of the Faubourg Montmartre were,
for want of space, taken to Montrouge.

The vegetable market which had been held in the Rue de la Ferronnerie
was transferred to the site of the ol