I spent yesterday at _Pére la Chaise_, and to day at _Versailles_. The two places are in opposite environs, and of very opposite characters--one certainly making you in love with life, the other almost as certainly with death. One could wander for ever in the wilderness of art at Versailles, and it must be a restless ghost that could not content itself with _Pére la Chaise_ for its elysium.
This beautiful cemetery is built upon the broad ascent of a hill, commanding the whole of Paris at a glance. It is a wood of small trees, laid out in alleys, and crowded with tombs and monuments of every possible description. You will scarce get through without being surprised into a tear; but, if affectation and fantasticalness in such a place do not more grieve than amuse you, you will much oftener smile. The whole thing is a melancholy mock of life. Its distinctions are all kept up. There are the fashionable avenues, lined with costly chapels and monuments, with the names of the exclusive tenants in golden letters upon the doors, iron railings set forbiddingly about the shrubs, and the blessing-scrap writ ambitiously in Latin. The tablets record the long family titles, and the offices and honors, perhaps the numberless virtues of the dead. They read like chapters of heraldry more than like epitaphs. It is a relief to get into the outer alleys, and see how poverty and simple feeling express what should be the same thing. It is usually some brief sentence, common enough, but often exquisitely beautiful in this prettiest of languages, and expressing always the _kind_ of sorrow felt by the mourner. You can tell, for instance, by the sentiment simply, without looking at the record below, whether the deceased was young, or much loved, or mourned by husband, or parent, or brother, or a circle of all. I noticed one, however, the humblest and simplest monument perhaps in the whole cemetery, which left the story beautifully untold; it was a slab of common marl, inscribed "_Pauvre Marie!_"--nothing more. I have thought of it, and speculated upon it, a great deal since. What was she? and who wrote her epitaph? _why_ was she _pauvre Marie_?
Before almost all the poorer monuments is a minature garden with a low wooden fence, and either the initials of the dead sown in flowers, or rose-trees, carefully cultivated, trained to hang over the stone. I was surprised to find, in a public cemetery, in December, roses in full bloom and valuable exotics at almost every grave. It speaks both for the sentiment and delicate principle of the people. Few of the more costly monuments were either interesting or pretty. One struck my fancy--a small open chapel, large enough to contain four chairs, with the slab facing the door, and a crucifix encircled with fresh flowers on a simple shrine above. It is a place where the survivors in a family might come and sit at any time, nowhere more pleasantly. From the chapel I speak of, you may look out and see all Paris; and I can imagine how it would lessen the feeling of desertion and forgetfulness that makes the anticipation of death so dreadful, to be certain that your friends would come, as they may here, and talk cheerfully and enjoy themselves near you, so to speak. The cemetery in summer must be one of the sweetest places in the world.