Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
France -- Description and travel; Netherlands -- Description and travel
After her condemnation, Marie Antoinette was not brought back to this
chamber. It was a far more miserable cell which saw her write her last
touching farewell to Madame Elizabeth. But this was the room in which
the Girondins spent their last night, when, as Riouffe, himself in the
prison at the time, says, "all during this frightful night their songs
sounded and if they stopt singing it was but to talk about their
country." The adjoining cell, now used as a sacristy, was the prison of
Robespierre.
Père la Chaise
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
[Footnote: From "Outre Mer." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]
The cemetery of Père la Chaise is the Westminster Abbey of Paris. Both
are the dwellings of the dead; but in one they repose in green alleys
and beneath the open sky--in the other their resting-place is in the
shadowy aisle, and beneath the dim arches of an ancient abbey. One is a
temple of nature; the other a temple of art. In one, the soft
melancholy of the scene is rendered still more touching by the warble
of birds and the shade of trees, and the grave receives the gentle
visit of the sunshine and the shower; in the other, no sound but the
passing footfall breaks the silence of the place; the twilight steals
in through high and dusky windows; and the damps of the gloomy vault
lie heavy on the heart, and leave their stain upon the moldering
tracery of the tomb.
Père la Chaise stands just beyond the Barrière d'Aulney, on a
hill-side, looking toward the city. Numerous gravel-walks, winding
through shady avenues and between marble monuments, lead up from the
principal entrance to a chapel on the summit. There is hardly a grave
that has not its little inclosure planted with shrubbery; and a thick
mass of foliage half conceals each funeral stone. The sighing of the
wind, as the branches rise and fall upon it,--the occasional note of a
bird among the trees, and the shifting of light and shade upon the
tombs beneath, have a soothing effect upon the mind; and I doubt
whether any one can enter that inclosure, where repose the dust and
ashes of so many great and good men, without feeling the religion of
the place steal over him, and seeing something of the dark and gloomy
expression pass off from the stern countenance of death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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