Only a few moments had consequently elapsed ere a dense mass of the people choked almost to suffocation the gothic arches and the nave of the sacred edifice, while the aisles were peopled by the more exalted individuals who had composed the funeral procession. Upwards of three thousand nobles, and a great number of ladies, all clad in mourning dresses, and attended by their pages and equerries, blended their melancholy voices with the responses of the canons of the cathedral; the bishops of the adjacent sees, and the archbishops in their rich raiment of velvet and cloth of silver, carried in their hands tapers of perfumed wax; Oriental myrrh and aloes burned in golden censers, and veiled the lofty dome with a light and diaphanous vapour which gave an unearthly aspect to the building; the organ pealed forth its deep and thrilling tones; and amid this scene of excitement, splendour, and suffering, the Cardinal de Gondy celebrated the mass, and the Bishop of Aire delivered the funeral oration. The coffin was then raised, and the crowd, hurriedly escaping from the church, once more spread itself over the neighbouring streets until the procession should again have formed; after which all this immense concourse of people accompanied the body of their beloved monarch to St. Lazare, where the clergy halted and returned to Paris; while the nobles who were to escort the mortuary-car to St. Denis, and who had hitherto followed it on foot, either mounted on horseback, or entered their carriages, in order to reach the Leaning Cross at the same time as the corpse. There, the grand prior and the monks of the royal abbey, in their mourning hoods, received the body of Henri IV from the hands of De Gondy, the Archbishop of Paris; and on the following day the Cardinal-Duc de Joyeuse celebrated a solemn mass and performed the funeral service of his late sovereign. At the close of the lugubrious ceremony the iron gates of the house of death swung hoarsely upon their hinges. The "De Profundis" pealed from the high altar, and Henry the Great was gathered to his ancestors. FOOTNOTES: [1] L'Etoile, vol. iv. pp.17, 18. Montfaucon, vol. v. p.429. [2] Matthieu, vol. 9361 of the royal manuscripts, p. 804. [3] Dupleix, p. 403. [4] L'Etoile, vol. iv. p. 30. [5] Charles de Bourbon-Conti, Comte d'Anquien, son of the Comte de Soissons.