ch was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, those
crosses and that priest said this: "Here sleeps the Death of the common
people; this is the poor man's end!"

* * * * *

O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city of
humanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindly
intentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.
The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speak
of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of
progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is
where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill
themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome
odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working
for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors,
those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have
lengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as a
capital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the common
people of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful
corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to bury
them, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, that
one can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thy
charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed
whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for
them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou
dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou
didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals
a hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest
on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: not
the briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God could
not be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is
always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike against
one another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is common
to all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the
worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfaucon
hastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no more
time than room to rot in: the earth is taken f