This being out of the question, we struggled on towards St. Michel, promising ourselves a bath of coolness and darkness under its lofty roof, and more especially in its underground caverns, where inhabit the celebrated mummies that have been preserved by the soil of the graveyard from dissolution. We crossed the last and sunniest street, and passed through a swing door into a large church, considerably hotter than anything or anywhere outside, and with an atmosphere of an unknown and stifling kind. We walked round it in silence, and, looking at each other, as we fanned ourselves with guide-books, we felt that our last chance of averting heat-apoplexy was to go underground at once and see the mummies. We found that the mummies lived in a place apart from the church, under the _clocher_, as the beautiful spire is called, by which we had steered our way, and we approached with feelings of unmitigated awe and creepiness the doorway to which we had been directed by two little boys who were playing cards in the shadow of a buttress. The door itself was round another buttress, in a low and crumbling stone archway, and we knocked timidly at it. It opened, and in a room of about the size and shape of a bonnet-box we beheld, instead of mummies, a cheerful family party at breakfast. We were about to retire, but the mother, wiping the _vin ordinaire_ from her jovial mouth, assured us that she was ready to show us the Cellar of the Mummies immediately. We squeezed past the rest of the family, and saw that at their very feet a precipitous stone staircase plunged into darkness. Our guide picked up a candlestick of a pattern that we were destined to see more of afterwards,--_i.e._ a long piece of wood with a tallow _bougie_ erect at one end of it,--and after an anxious inquiry on our parts as to whether there was any scent _là-bas_ in the cave had been answered in the negative, we followed her into the abyss. It proved to be a circular vault, made, like everything else in Bordeaux, of dusty yellow stone, and, after a minute of despondency on the part of the _bougie_, we saw, lining its walls, a dismal array of little brown figures, propped on end behind a low wooden rail. The guide advanced with alacrity to her task. ‘Behold, mesdames, the celebrated mummies of St. Michel’-- She paused, and flourished the candle in the awful faces of a group of objects who were just preserved from being skeletons by a ragged covering of dusty leather which had once been flesh. [Illustration: ‘BEHOLD, MESDAMES, THE CELEBRATED MUMMIES OF ST. MICHEL.’] ‘_Voiçi la famille empoisonnée!_ Observe the morsel still in the mouth of the little one! Mosh-rhume! _Hein?_’ She made a light-hearted attempt at the English word, but seeing we looked bewildered, passed easily back into French. ‘Mushrooms, mesdames. All the family are found dead together!’