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Updated: June 22, 2025
A catafalque contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling hand, to throw holy water on the cloth which covered the bier. And a voice said within him: "You are dead, since Micheline is about to marry another." He made an effort to banish this importunate idea. He could not succeed. Thoughts flew through his brain with fearful rapidity.
The body was deposited upon a catafalque in the Church of the Santissimi Apostoli, where the funeral was celebrated by all the artists and Florentines in Rome. In fulfilment of the wish of Michael Angelo, repeated two days before his death, Lionardo made arrangements for the removal of his uncle’s remains to Florence.
A magnificent canopy of cloth of gold surmounted the bier, and on either side of the catafalque were placed two temporary altars; ten others having been erected in the state-gallery, at which the bishops and the curés of the several metropolitan parishes daily performed six high and one hundred low masses.
The death of his wife, however, gave the earl a special opportunity to display his extravagant tastes. He spent more than four thousand pounds on the funeral ceremonies, importing from France a huge black velvet catafalque which had shortly before been used at the public funeral of Napoleon's marshal, Duroc, while the house blazed with enormous wax tapers and glittered with cloth of gold.
He knelt down upon the cold stones and remained in that position for some minutes; at last he arose, as pale as the deceased Countess herself; he ascended the steps of the catafalque and bent over the corpse... At that moment it seemed to him that the dead woman darted a mocking look at him and winked with one eye. Hermann started back, took a false step and fell to the ground.
The Bishop was walking about the catafalque casting holy water with a brush against the coffin above. He walked about a second time swinging the heavy copper censer, then pronounced the Requiescat in pace, "dismissing," as we find inscribed in the convent records, "a tired soul out of all the storms of life into the divine tranquillity of death."
The bed looked like a catafalque, the candles like funeral torches, and the whole place breathed the magnificent discomfort of royalty, and seemed hardly intended for a human habitation. Dolores barely glanced at it all, as her companion locked the first door and led her on to the next room.
Her face is almost hidden under a voluminous frill, made of innumerable rows of lace, crimped with a crimping-iron, and her crown, half a yard in height, surrounded by golden rays, looks like a hideous catafalque erected over her head. Of the same material, and embroidered in the same manner, are the trousers of the Infant Jesus.
The rustic, white-walled nave was too narrow to contain them all, and the surplus flowed into the street. Arbeltier, the village carpenter, had erected a rudimentary catafalque, which was draped in black and bordered with wax tapers, and placed in front of the altar steps.
The present one, which dates from 1622, is more like a catafalque, and unless one sees it in motion, with the massive white oxen pulling it, one cannot believe in it as a vehicle at all. It stood in front of the Duomo some four yards from the Baptistery gates in a line with the Duomo's central doors and the high altar.
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