“I turn the page and find that we are only in the thick of all these dead men’s bones and uncleanness, for the republican resurrectionists began by the Bourbons and had still to disentomb all the Valois, and further back, up to the Capetian line, and are not content until the almost legendary remains of Dagobert and Madame Dagobert reappear. Suffice it to add, that after Louis the Well-beloved had been disposed of, came in succession, like the line of royal ghosts seen by Macbeth, Charles V, who died in 1380, whose body was one of the few well-preserved, and was arrayed in royal robes, with a gilt crown and sceptre, still bright; that of his wife, Jeanne de Bourbon, who still held in her bony hand a decayed distaff of wood; Charles VI with his queen, Isabeau de Bavière; Charles VII and his wife, Marie D’Anjou; and then Blanche de Navarre, who died in 1391. Charles VIII, of whom nothing but dust remained, Henry II, Catherine de Medicis, Charles IX, and Henry III, were disinterred on the morning of the 18th; ‘after the workmen’s dinner,’ Louis XII and his queen, and among other less interesting royal remains, the bones of Hugh, Comte de Paris, father of Hugh Capet; and so on the work went, till one tires even of the details of the preservation of this or that king or queen. Can anything be more shocking than to know that all the horrors of decay and decomposition will remain even after two or three centuries have passed over the lifeless form, and that, supposing one has the ill luck to be thus coffined and one’s body removed, ‘a black fluid, emitting a noxious smell,’ will run from out our last home, as was the case with those royal remains during that hot summer month at St. Denis in 1793?” The Rev. H. R. Haweis says:— “You cannot preserve the buried dead securely from the outrages of the living. The people who dig graves, or are employed to remove bones, are not as a rule scrupulous, but they are very often drunk. The other day only a number of wild Irish were so employed at New York; the bodies were offered for sale on the ground to a party of medical students. These young fellows had the grace to shrink from the horrors they then witnessed. One coffin was found full of a heavy decomposed mass, like spermaceti; it was used to grease the axle-tree of the cart. Another coffin contained the body of a woman, aged 20, as the inscription announced. She had rested for 107 years—laid there with what tears, what tender regrets of husband, or lover, or mother! But now her head was rudely seized and kicked like a football from one ruffian to the other.” But the “sweet sleep and calm rest” of the dead was not only broken by the ruthless hand of man, but was even disturbed by the elements.