[Illustration: A CORNER IN THE CEMETERY OF PÈRE-LACHAISE: TOMBS OF COUTURE, THE PAINTER; LEDRU-ROLLIN, THE STATESMAN; COUSIN, THE PHILOSOPHER; AND AUBER, THE COMPOSER.
Each of the great cemeteries, both within and without the walls, is under the charge of a _conservateur_, having under him a receiver or steward, a surveyor, clerks, guardians, and grave-diggers. The guards, who number in all a hundred and thirty-five, including five brigadiers and fifteen sous-brigadiers, have all been sworn into office and are empowered to draw up procès-verbaux. The landscape-gardening of the cemeteries is all under the direction of the _service des promenades_, and the municipal administration of the city of Paris takes a laudable pride in maintaining the picturesqueness and attractiveness of these places of sepulchre. Many of the tombs, or funerary monuments, are preserved through legacies or donations, and the city assumes the care of others possessing an historical or patriotic interest, as those of Abélard and Héloïse, of Molière, of La Fontaine, of Casimir Périer, and the "four sergeants of La Rochelle." Consequently, the cemeteries of the capital are, distinctly, one of the features of the city,--Père-Lachaise, particularly, is a most curious, picturesque, original, and characteristic "sight," and, alike on the day of Toussaints when they are visited by the populace almost _en masse_, and when they receive the solitary funeral procession winding slowly through the streets, the carriages followed by a long train of mourners on foot, they may be said to be truly representative institutions of this people with whom we are for the moment concerned.
"The people of Paris," says M. Henry Havard, "are, assuredly, the most extraordinary people that there are in the world. [This, of course; no reference to the capital, even the slightest, is permissible without this statement.] Not only do they possess a prodigious quantity of remarkable qualities, and a number almost equally great of not less remarkable defects, but that which distinguishes them from the rest of humanity is, that their virtues and their vices, their good qualities and their defects, are in a measure contradictory.
"To cite only one example,--no population is more profoundly irreverent and more completely sceptical. The glories the most assured, the reputations the most solidly established, scarcely find toleration in their eyes. A scoffer by nature, a jeerer by temperament, a humbugger by education, the Parisian perpetually forces himself to accept nothing seriously, and to respect neither sex nor age nor glory. But, by one of those contradictions with which this character swarms, the moment that death has accomplished his sinister work, everything becomes to him sacred.