And an indefinable horror seized upon us
of death in a hospital, which seems to be only an administrative
formality. One would say that in that abode of agony, everything is so
well administered, regulated, reduced to system, that death opens it as
if it were an administrative bureau.

While we were having the death registered,--_Mon Dieu!_ the paper, all
covered with writing and flourishes for a poor woman's death!--a man
rushed out of an adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the saint of the day and
give it to his child. As he passed, the skirt of the happy father's coat
swept the sheet on which the death was registered from the desk to the
floor.

When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes
together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable
things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. It was a
ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her
last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the
coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.

_Monday, August 18._--The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the
hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the
poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to
reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness
of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the
prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little
girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of
nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a
poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a
head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a
Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited
by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes
there is already a gleam of the life beyond.

Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre
cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the
city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the
intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is
lowered into a cellar.

_Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital