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At No. 65, a malodorous court leads to the old vaulted entrance to the charnel-houses of St. Paul, where Rabelais and the Man with the Iron Mask were buried; and to the R. of this vault a narrow street leads to the Marché Ste. Catherine on the site of the canons' houses of the monastery of Ste.
They were enraged at the obstinate resistance offered them by the village, and the frightful loss they had sustained during the five hours' conflict provoked them to the most atrocious reprisals. The gutters ran red with blood, the piled dead in the streets formed barricades, some of the more open places were charnel-houses, from whose depths rose the death-rattle of men in their last agony.
The site of the immense Necropolis of Les Innocents, which for six centuries swallowed up half the dead of Paris, roughly corresponds to the parallelogram formed by the modern Rues Berger, St. Denis, Ferronnerie and de la Lingerie, and one of the old vaulted charnel-houses may still be seen at the ground floor of No. 7 Rue des Innocents.
They do not smile now; they grin horribly in the sunlight, grin as the fleshless skulls of dead men grin on a battlefield after those sextons of the veldt the grey-hooded, curved-beaked vultures have screamed their final farewell to the charnel-houses of war noble war, splendid war, pastime of potentates and princes, invented in hell and patented in all the temples of sorrow.
Raked with broadside after broadside they fought on, drifting into ever more dangerous proximity to the shoals, their hulls riddled, their decks charnel-houses; resolved to sink rather than strike; while the English poured in a ceaseless storm of shot at close range but always evaded the one danger, of being grappled and boarded, the sole condition under which the Spaniard could fight at an advantage.
"Maybe you are right," said the old woman, with a ghastly laugh; "carles and carlines agree weel with funeral vaults and charnel-houses, and when an auld bedral dwells near the dead, he is living, ye ken, among his customers Halloo! Powheid! Lazarus Powheid! there is a gentleman would speak with you;" and she added, with some sort of emphasis, "an.
Vainly did Deroulede try to persuade, to entreat, to bribe. The sullen guardians of these twelve charnel-houses knew nothing of individual prisoners. But the Citizen-Deputy was allowed to look for himself.
It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.
Behind and around us were the vaults I have already described; before us the devout audience, dimly shown by the light which streamed on their faces through one or two low Gothic windows, such as give air and light to charnel-houses.
As corpses they thought to live; in black draped they their corpses; even in their talk do I still feel the evil flavour of charnel-houses. And he who liveth nigh unto them liveth nigh unto black pools, wherein the toad singeth his song with sweet gravity. Better songs would they have to sing, for me to believe in their Saviour: more like saved ones would his disciples have to appear unto me!
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