CV. Le cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

CV

The Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

M. de Boville had, in fact, encountered the funeral procession conducting Valentine to her final resting place.

The weather was gloomy and overcast; a wind still warm, but already deadly to the yellowed leaves, tore them little by little from the branches, now bared, and sent them whirling over the immense crowd that thronged the boulevards.

M. de Villefort, a pure Parisian, regarded the Père-Lachaise cemetery as the only one worthy of receiving the mortal remains of a Parisian family; the others seemed to him mere country churchyards, boarding-houses of death. Only at Père-Lachaise could a deceased person of good society be lodged at home.

He had bought there, as we have seen, the perpetual concession upon which stood the monument so swiftly peopled by all the members of his first family.

On the façade of the mausoleum one read: FAMILY OF SAINT-MÉRAN AND VILLEFORT; for such had been the last wish of poor Renée, mother of Valentine.

It was therefore toward Père-Lachaise that the pompous cortege set out from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. They crossed all of Paris, took the Faubourg du Temple, then the outer boulevards as far as the cemetery. More than fifty carriages of the gentry followed twenty mourning coaches, and behind those fifty carriages, more than five hundred persons still walked on foot.

They were almost all young men whom the death of Valentine had struck like a thunderbolt, and who, despite the icy vapor of the age and the prosaism of the times, succumbed to the poetic influence of that beautiful, chaste, adorable young girl taken in her flower.

At the exit from Paris, a swift team of four horses was seen to arrive, which suddenly halted, stiffening their nervous hocks like springs of steel: it was M. de Monte-Cristo.

The count descended from his calash and came to mingle with the crowd following the funeral car on foot.

Château-Renaud caught sight of him; he immediately descended from his coupé and came to join him. Beauchamp likewise left the hired cabriolet in which he was.

The count looked attentively through every gap left by the crowd; he was visibly searching for someone. At length, he could contain himself no longer.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”