Certainly, of all the porters in Paris, the porter of Pere-Lachaise is the luckiest. In the first place, he has no gate-cord to pull; then, instead of a lodge, he has a house,--an establishment which is not quite ministerial, although a vast number of persons come under his administration, and a good many employees. And this governor of the dead has a salary, with emoluments, and acts under powers of which none complain; he plays despot at his ease. His lodge is not a place of business, though it has departments where the book-keeping of receipts, expenses, and profits, is carried on. The man is not a /suisse/, nor a concierge, nor actually a porter. The gate which admits the dead stands wide open; and though there are monuments and buildings to be cared for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,--an authority placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all. Nevertheless, this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,--that chimerical creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature of reason moving on a thousand paws which are seldom unanimous in motion.
This guardian of the cemetery may be called a concierge who has reached the condition of a functionary, not soluble by dissolution!
His place is far from being a sinecure. He does not allow any one to be buried without a permit; he must count his dead. He points out to you in this vast field the six feet square of earth where you will one day put all you love, or all you hate, a mistress, or a cousin. Yes, remember this: all the feelings and emotions of Paris come to end here, at this porter's lodge, where they are administrationized. This man has registers in which his dead are booked; they are in their graves, and also on his records. He has under him keepers, gardeners, grave-diggers, and their assistants. He is a personage. Mourning hearts do not speak to him at first. He does not appear at all except in serious cases, such as one corpse mistaken for another, a murdered body, an exhumation, a dead man coming to life. The bust of the reigning king is in his hall; possibly he keeps the late royal, imperial, and quasi-royal busts in some cupboard,--a sort of little Pere-Lachaise all ready for revolutions. In short, he is a public man, an excellent man, good husband and good father,--epitaph apart. But so many diverse sentiments have passed before him on biers; he has seen so many tears, true and false; he has beheld sorrow under so many aspects and on so many faces; he has heard such endless thousands of eternal woes,--that to him sorrow has come to be nothing more than a stone an inch thick, four feet long, and twenty-four inches wide. As for regrets, they are the annoyances of his office; he neither breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off the rain of an inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other feelings; he will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the "Auberge des Adrets," the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered by Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he /is/ sublime through every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.
When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of temper.
"I told you," he was saying, "to water the flowers from the rue Massena to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. You paid no attention to me! /Sac-a-papier/! suppose the relations should take it into their heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what would they say to me? They'd shriek as if they were burned; they'd say horrid things of us, and calumniate us--"
"Monsieur," said Jacquet, "we want to know where Madame Jules is buried."
"Madame Jules /who/?" he asked. "We've had three Madame Jules within the last week. Ah," he said, interrupting himself, "here comes the funeral of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that!
He has soon followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin to go, rattle down like a wager. Lots of bad blood in Parisians."
"Monsieur," said Jacquet, touching him on the arm, "the person I spoke of is Madame Jules Desmarets, the wife of the broker of that name."
"Ah, I know!" he replied, looking at Jacquet. "Wasn't it a funeral with thirteen mourning coaches, and only one mourner in the twelve first? It was so droll we all noticed it--"
"Monsieur, take care, Monsieur Desmarets is with me; he might hear you, and what you say is not seemly."
"I beg pardon, monsieur! you are quite right. Excuse me, I took you for heirs. Monsieur," he continued, after consulting a plan of the cemetery, "Madame Jules is in the rue Marechal Lefebre, alley No. 4, between Mademoiselle Raucourt, of the Comedie-Francaise, and Monsieur Moreau-Malvin, a butcher, for whom a handsome tomb in white marble has been ordered, which will be one of the finest in the cemetery--"
"Monsieur," said Jacquet, interrupting him, "that does not help us."
"True," said the official, looking round him. "Jean," he cried, to a man whom he saw at a little distance, "conduct these gentlemen to the grave of Madame Jules Desmarets, the broker's wife. You know where it is,--near to Mademoiselle Raucourt, the tomb where there's a bust."
The two friends followed the guide; but they did not reach the steep path which leads to the upper part of the cemetery without having to pass through a score of proposals and requests, made, with honied softness, by the touts of marble-workers, iron-founders, and monumental sculptors.
"If monsieur would like to order /something/, we would do it on the most reasonable terms."
