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Updated: June 20, 2025
Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles. A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed.
In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while she ran her fingers comb-wise through her hair.
He hit upon a floral fire-badge as the proper thing, and thus it was that when the company of mourners was assembled, and the funeral service in progress, there arrived and was set upon the coffin, in the view of all, that triumph of the florist's art, a shield of white roses, with this legend written across it in red immortelles: "Admit within fire lines only." It was shocking, but irresistible.
The little soldier cursed his sleep, but tried to console himself by looking at his bouquet, which was of immortelles. 'It is the flower of remembrance, thought he, forgetting that it is also the flower of the dead. When the night came, he slept with one eye open, and jumped up twenty times an hour.
Once I remember to have observed two working- women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder. "Eh! what extravagance!"
All visitors linger pensively about it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and mementoes of it; all Parisian youths and maidens who are disappointed in love come there to bail out when they are full of tears; yea, many stricken lovers make pilgrimages to this shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail and "grit" their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the sympathies of the chastened spirits of that tomb with offerings of immortelles and budding flowers.
The grave was a pit fifteen to twenty feet deep, cut like a well, covered with stones to keep out wild beasts, and planted round with the cylindrical euphorbia by way of immortelles.
When I find it I shall shed some tears on it, and stack up some bouquets and immortelles, and cart away from it some gravel whereby to remember that howsoever blotted by crime their lives may have been, these ruffians did one just deed, at any rate, albeit it was not warranted by the strict letter of the law. Heloise entered a convent and gave good-bye to the world and its pleasures for all time.
"The boy is a beggar," he said to himself: "he shall not be about Alois." The woman dared not say anything aloud, but when the grave was closed and the mourners had gone, she put a wreath of immortelles into Alois's hands and bade her go and lay it reverently on the dark, unmarked mound where the snow was displaced. Nello and Patrasche went home with broken hearts.
At the boy's cradle a prophecy had been spoken: 'He will die on the throne of France! The mother's heart dreamt of a second Napoleon. "My beams have kissed the wreath of immortelles on his grave, and this night they kissed the forehead of the old grandame, while in a dream the picture floated before her which thou mayest draw the poor boy on the throne of France."
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