It is said that, sooner or later, everyone in Paris, whether native or stranger, climbs the eastern hill to where, among its cypresses and myrtles, the great cemetery of Père Lachaise lies like another and more southerly city, states "H.R." in the Manchester Guardian." The visitor may be one of the vast crowd of pious but cheerful pilgrims who throng its avenues in countless thousands during the winter months, when damp areas of fog drift up and across from the Seine and the few last wet leaves clutch at the ground like limpets; he may be one of a small provincial family group clad in black and come to discover the whereabouts of a Parisian relative's ashes in the Columbarium; he may have come with the sole romantic intention of depositing a bunch of violets at the monument to Abélard and Héloïse; or he may have come simply to see why the rest of the world comes—to hold imaginary conversations with himself and to counter with the Johnsonian rebuff the JEschylean phrases about life and death which the place inspires At any rate, come he will and, whatever his reason, he will not escape consciousness of the fact so often repeated here: that there are as many graves in Pere Lachaise as there are houses in Paris. The very words in which this is uttered curl themselves about the wet branches of the trees, bow soundlessly from the wreathed horns on the monuments, and creek themselves out from the shoes arcener:
"There are thousand graves here—ws many graves as there are houses ini the city." But if he at all as cheery as most of the pil grims who bandy the enigmatic coincidence about it will not debar him from a smile—uniess, indeed, he refects that in any churchyata mest of what he is thinking stands a good chance of being in very doubtful taste. True, he can behave excellently in the tittle Exgiish cemetery in Rome, but there he is awed at the graves of Shelley and Keats, and the almost-blind old lady at the -gate appeals to his pity. Similarly the cemetery which is the chief ornament of Genoa affects him in the right way, but there he-has in mind the words of someone in the train who will have warned him that it is not a cemetery he will see but, proprie, an art gallery.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.