sent ones. Regret makes itself friendly and
gracious; grief itself takes on a little coquetry. Nothing is more
delicate and more moving than this annual pilgrimage of the people of
Paris to these places of eternal repose."

Many of the details gathered by M. Havard in the course of his careful
inspection of these respect-compelling enclosures are worthy of
preservation. In Pere-Lachaise, for example, it is well not to be too
credulous. "You may there discover, in fact, very many tombs decorated
with names familiar in various ways, and even very great names, which
certainly have never contained the ashes of those whose memory they
honor. Neither Lavoisier, nor Lesurques, 'victim of the most deplorable
of judicial errors,' as his epitaph says, nor General Malet, whose body
was interred in the cemetery of executed criminals, would be able to
find themselves under the monuments which a posthumous piety has reared
to them. The same can be said of the tombs of Racine, of Moliere, and of
La Fontaine, which were the first to embellish these groves, and of
which the style proclaims clearly enough that they do not date further
back than the First Empire. It is the same for Heloise and Abelard, and
for their graceful little structure to which the lovers and the newly
married do not fail to pay pious visits. This historic tomb, constructed
of composite materials, is also of very recent erection. The two statues
ornamented, in the last century, the monument which stood in the Abbaye
de Paraclet; from there they were transported at first to the Musee des
Petits-Augustins, and, in 1817, to the place where we now see them. The
graceful canopy which covers them is formed of materials borrowed from
the ancient Abbaye de Nogent-sur-Marne. As to the ashes of these perfect
lovers, they have been scattered to the winds for a great many
centuries."

Many of the old cemeteries in the city, he says, owe their temporary
celebrity to the accidental interment within their enclosures of some
particularly illustrious deceased. "That which surrounded Saint-Roch
received the remains of Corneille. It is known that Moliere was secretly
buried in the Cimetiere de Saint-Joseph, which received also the body of
La Fontaine. As to the little cemetery of Saint-Gervais, we should be
ignorant of its existence if the authors of the seventeenth century had
not taken pains to reveal to us that Marion Delorme was there laid to
rest. Still more, the fact would have