“What a horrid place! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed; and bodies removed to the bone-house before they are sufficiently decayed to make their removal decent!... The bone-house is a large, round pit. Into this had been shot from a wheelbarrow the but partly decayed inmates of the smashed coffins. On the north side was a man digging a grave. He was quite drunk. So, indeed, were all the grave-diggers we saw.” Walker saw the tin plates removed from the coffins broken up, and witnessed how many wagon-loads of bones were taken to the charnel-houses. Lord Ronald Gower writes in _Vanity Fair_:— “The other day I came across a somewhat rare little brochure,—an account of the violation of the royal sepulchres of St. Denis, during the first French Revolution. The work of destruction and sacrilege commenced early in October, 1793, and lasted all the month. The first corpse found was that of Henry IV, the once beloved Henri de Navarre. Some curiosity, if not affection, still seems to have lingered even among those patriots who have constituted themselves body-snatchers, and the bearnais was propped up against the church wall in his shroud, and became quite an attraction for the crowd. One of the republican guards even condescended to cut off the king’s gray, upturned moustache, and place it on his lip; another removed the beard, which he declared he would keep as a relic. After these marks of attention were exhausted, the body was thrown into a huge pit filled with quicklime, into which successively followed those of its ancestors and descendants. “On the next day the corpses of Henry IV’s wife, Maria de Medicis, that of his son, Louis XIII, and that of his grandson, Louis XIV, were added to this. The body of the sun-king (as Louis XIV’s courtiers loved to call him) was as ‘black as ink.’ What a contrast to that majestic, bewigged head, as we see it on the canvas of Le Brun and Rigault, must not that poor blackened skull have been! The body of the Grand Monarch’s wife and that of his son, the Dauphin (father of Louis XV) followed; all these, and especially the latter, were in a state of shocking decay.