As I write there is an appalling, long-drawn crash, which brings the whole Quarter to its doors and windows. "Bombs" are in everybody's mouth, and I find myself automatically repeating a sentence out of the Latin exercise-book of my boyhood: "How comes it that thunder is sometimes heard when the sky is clear?" I irrelevantly remember that "sometimes" must be translated "not never." In the streets little groups are gathered, gesticulating and surmising. Some say "The Pantheon," others "The Luxembourg"; others trust it is only a gas explosion. I shock my group by hoping it is a bomb, so that I may say I have heard it go off. But I know nothing till I read "Paris Day by Day" next evening in "The Daily Telegraph," and find that my ambition has been gratified, and that the chief victim of the explosion is a Decadent Poet. Has any one been taking seriously Nordau's cry for the extinction of the Degenerates?
The dead have their day in France, but it was not le jour des morts when I bethought myself of visiting the grave of Maupassant. I do not care for these crowded "at homes,"-I prefer to pay my respects in solitude. You will not think this remark flippant if you are familiar with French cemeteries, if you know those great family sepulchres, fitted up as little chapels, through whose doors, crowned with the black cross, you may see the great wax tapers in the candelabra at the altar, the stained-glass windows with the figure of the Madonna and Child, the eikons of Christ, the praying-stools, the vases, the busts or photographs of the deceased-worthy people who not only thought life worth living but death worth dying, and did the one and the other respectably and becomingly. Maupassant lies in one art-quarter of Paris, just as Heinrich Heine lies in the other. The cemetery is off the Boulevard Raspail, within bow-shot of the ateliers of Whistler and Bouguereau, overlooked by an imposing statue of M. Raspail which sets forth that scientific citizen's many virtues and services. He proclaimed Universal Franchise in 1830, he proclaimed the Republic in 1848, and his pedestal now proclaims with equal cocksureness that science is the only religion of the future. "Give me a cell and I will build you up all organised life," cries the statue, and its stony hand seems to wave theatrically as in emulation of the bas-reliefs on its base representing Raspail animating his camarades to victory. But alas! tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse, and not all the residents of the Boulevard are aware of the origin of their address. Chateaubriand survives as a steak and Raspail as a Boulevard.
The cemetery Montparnasse is densely populated, and I wandered long without finding the author of "Boule de Suif." It was a wilderness of artificial flowers, great wreaths made of beads. Beads, beads, beads, black or lavender, and even white and yellow, blooming garishly in all sizes on every grave and stone, in strange theatrical sentimentality; complex products of civilisation, making death as unnatural as the feverish life of the Boulevards. Sometimes the beaded flowers were protected by glass shades, sometimes they were supplemented by leaden or marble images. Over one grave I found a little porcelain angel, his wings blue as with the cold; and under him last year's angel in melancholy supersession. Elsewhere, most terrible sight of all in this ghastly place, was a white porcelain urn on which were painted a woman's and a man's hand clasped, the graceful feminine fingers in artistic contrast with the scrupulously-cuffed male wrist with the motto, "A mon mari, Regrets eternels." Wondering how soon she remarried, I roved gloomily among these arcades of bourgeois beads, these fadeless flowers, these monstrous ever-blacks, relieved to find a touch of humour, as in a colossal wreath ostentatiously inscribed "A ma belle-mere." I peeped into the great family tombs, irresistibly reminded of "Lo, the poor Indian," and the tribes who provision their dead; I wondered if the old ghosts ever turn in their graves (as there is plenty of room for them to do) when some daughter of their house makes an imprudent alliance. Do they hold family councils in the chapel, I thought, and lament the growing scepticism of their grandchildren? Do they sigh to see themselves so changed from the photographs in the family album that confronts their hollow orbits? Do they take themselves as seriously in death as they did in life? But they were all scornfully incommunicative. And at last, despairing of discovering the goal of my journeyings, I inquired of a guardian in a peaked blue cap and a blue cloak, who informed me that it was in the twenty-sixth section of the other cemetery. Wonderfully precise, red-tape, bureaucratic, symmetrical people, the French, for all their superficial curvetings! I repaired to the other portion of the cemetery, to lose myself again among boundless black beads and endless chapels and funereal urns; and at last I besought another blue-cloaked guardian to show me the grave of Maupassant. "Par ici, " he said nonchalantly: and eschewing the gravel walks he took a short cut through a lane of dead maidens-
What's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?-
and, descending an avenue of estimable peres 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 la Vextraordinaire." "Rien du tout d'extraordinaire," he repeated doggedly. "Sauf le cadavre," I retorted. He shook his head, "Tres pauvre la tombe," he muttered: "pas du tout riche." Another guardian, walleyed, here joined him, and catching the subject of conversation, "Tres 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 la!" and both guardians shook their heads dolefully. "Tres 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 Tolstoi considers great, of the old servant's summing up: "La vie, voyez-vous, ca n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit. "Perhaps," thought I, "'t is the same with death." "The Societe 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 ought not to apply. "Je pensais qu'il avait une certaine position," observed the Frenchman dubiously. "Non ," replied the wall-eyed guardian, shaking his head, "Non, il est mort sans le sou." At the mention of coin I distributed pourboire. The first guardian went away. I lingered at the tomb, alive now to its more sordid side. Only one row of bourgeois graves, some occupied, some still ss louer, separated it from an unlovely waste piece of ground, bounded by the gaunt brick wall of the fast-filling cemetery. As I began to muse thereon, I heard a cry, and perceived my guardian peeping from round the corner of a distant tomb, and beckoning me with imperative forefinger. I wanted to stay; I wanted to have "Meditations at the grave of Maupassant," to ponder on the irony of death, to think of the brilliant novelist, the lover of life, cut off in his pride, to lie amid perspectives of black and lavender beads. But my guardian would not let me. "Il n'y a rien ss voir," he cried almost angrily, and haled me off to see the real treasures of his cemetery. In vain I persisted that I must not give him trouble, that I could discover the beauties for myself." "O monsieur!" he said reproachfully. Fearing he might return my pourboire, I followed him helplessly to inspect the pompous bead-covered tombs of the well-to-do, shocking him by stopping to muse at the rude mound of an anonymous corpse, remembered only by a little bunch of immortelles. One of the fashionable sepulchres stood open, and was being dusted by a man and a woman (on a dust from dust principle, apparently). Most of the dust seemed to be little beads. My keeper exchanged a word with the cleaners, and I profited by the occasion to escape. I sneaked back to the grave of Maupassant, but I had barely achieved a single Reflection, when "Hola, hola!" resounded in loud tones from afar. I started guiltily, but in a moment I realised that it was the cry of expulsion. The sunset was fading, and the gates were to be locked. I hastened across the cemetery, evading my guardian's face of reproach, and in another few moments the paths were deserted, the twilight had fallen, and the dead were left alone with their beads.