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I find the springs of the profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardened indifference of the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to whether Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing and jesting at their dreary work. "A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, For and a shrouding-sheet: O, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet!"
The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed about like foot balls by the profane multitude; like the grave-diggers in Hamlet, they made a jest of the lips before which the nations had trembled." Having begun by waging this profane warfare upon their own glorious dead, another scene of the fatal drama immediately succeeded.
Sometimes it injects laughter, sometimes horror, into tragedy. It will bring Romeo face to face with the apothecary, Macbeth with the witches, Hamlet with the grave-diggers. Sometimes it may, without discord, as in the scene between King Lear and his jester, mingle its shrill voice with the most sublime, the most dismal, the dreamiest music of the soul.
The grave-diggers have not eaten into it: it is the patrimony of the sons, not the provision of the parents, who, to sustain themselves, levy at most a few mouthfuls of the ooze of putrid humours. Beside the dish which they are kneading and protecting are two Necrophori; a couple, no more. Four collaborated in the burial. What has become of the other two, both males?
After a few short prayers the priest threw a handful of earth on the remains of this woman, and the grave-diggers, having asked for their fee, made haste to fill the grave in order to dig another.
When Finn found the little dead body he silently nosed and drew it out from the cave. Out there on the open turf of the Down Nature would see speedily to its sepulture, for Nature employs many grave-diggers and suffers no unseemly waste. She works on a huge scale, but only the superficial see wastefulness in Nature's plans.
The candle was extinguished; the head rolled upon the floor, and I fell prostrate, as if a terrible fever had stricken me down an icy-shudder convulsed me, and, with a deep sigh, I swooned. The following morning at six the grave-diggers found me, cold as the flagstones on which I lay. Solange, betrayed by her father's letter, had been arrested the same day, condemned, and executed.
There is to be found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river.
A few moments afterward the detail arrived with the stretchers, and Ailsa stood up, drew aside the screen, and went down into the gray obscurity of the court-yard. Grave-diggers were at work on a near hillside; she could hear the clink clink of spade and pick; reveille was sounding from hill to hill; the muffled stirring became a dull, sustained clatter, never ceasing around her for one instant.
At a later period, great care was taken to prevent visitors losing their way amidst the labyrinth of passages. The guardianship of the catacombs was confided to a certain body of the clergy, who went under the name of fossores, or grave-diggers.
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