and, descending an avenue of estimable _pères de famille_, turned the corner of an elegant sepulchre, to which only the most fashionable ghosts could possibly have the entry. Dear, dear, what heart-burnings there must be among the more snobbish shadows of Montparnasse! My guide made me pause and admire, and he likewise insisted on the tribute of my tear before an obelisk to slaughtered soldiers and a handsome memorial to burnt firemen. But perceiving my impatience to arrive at the grave of Maupassant, "_Mais, monsieur_," he protested, "_il n'y a rien d'extraordinaire._" "_Vraiment!_" said I, "_c'est là l'extraordinaire._" "_Rien du tout d'extraordinaire_," he repeated doggedly. "_Sauf le cadavre_," I retorted. He shook his head, "_Très pauvre la tombe_," he muttered: "_pas du tout riche._" Another guardian, wall-eyed, here joined him, and catching the subject of conversation, "_Très pauvre_," he corroborated compassionately. But he went with us, accompanied by a very lean young Frenchman with a soft felt hat, an over-long frock-coat, tweed trowsers, and a black alpaca umbrella. He looked like a French translation of some character of Dickens. At last we arrived at the grave. "_C'est là!_" and both guardians shook their heads dolefully. "_Très pauvre!_" sighed one. "_Rien du tout--rien_," sighed the other. And, thank Heaven, they were right. Nothing but green turf and real flowers, and a name and a date on a black cross--the first real grave I had come across. No beads, no tawdry images, nothing but the dignity of death, nothing but "Guy de Maupassant, 6 Juillet, '93," on the cross, and "Guy de Maupassant, 1850-93," at the foot. The shrubs were few, and the flowers were common and frost-bitten; but in that desert of bourgeois beads, the simple green grave stood out in touching sublimity. The great novelist seemed to be as close to the reality of death as he had been to that of life. Those other dead seemed so falsely romanticist. It was a beautiful sunny winter afternoon. There was a feel of spring in the air, of the Resurrection and the Life. Beyond the bare slim branches of the trees of the other cemetery, gracefully etched against the sky, the sun was setting in a beautiful bank of dusky clouds. Life was so alive that day, and death so dead. Outside the tomb the poem of light and air, and inside the tomb--what? I thought of the last words of "Une Vie," that fine novel, which even Tolstoï considers great, of the old servant's summing up: "_La vie, voyez-vous, ça n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit_." "Perhaps," thought I, "'t is the same with death." "The _Société des Gens de Lettres_ had to buy the ground for him," interrupted the wall-eyed guardian compassionately. The Dickensy Frenchman heaved a great sigh. "_Vous croyez!_" he said. "Yes," asseverated the other guardian--"he has it in perpetuity." Ignorant of the customs of death, I wondered if one's corpse were liable to eviction, and whether the statute of limitations