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Updated: June 23, 2025
Indeed, I don't think his blood-hounds could climb the ascent to this cave." As I entered, I felt myself treading on bones! I looked around the narrow chamber of death, and every where bones human bones covered the rocky floor; but no sign of art or trace of religious obsequies rewarded my scrutiny. "Bless me!" said I, "what a journey I have had for nothing!
There was a prodigious long procession of Flambeaux; Friars, white, black, and gray, very trumpery, and marvellous foul-looking; no plumes, banners, scutcheons, led horses, or open chariots, altogether most mean obsequies. The march began at eight in the evening, and did not end till four o'clock the next morning, for at each church they passed they stopped for a Hymn and Holy Water.
Thus died Peter Stuyvesant, a valiant soldier, a loyal subject, an upright governor, and an honest Dutchman, who wanted only a few empires to desolate to have been immortalized as a hero! His funeral obsequies were celebrated with the utmost grandeur and solemnity. The town was perfectly emptied of its inhabitants, who crowded in throngs to pay the last sad honors to their good old governor.
Now it was the choral societies, deputations from the Army and Navy, officers of all arms of the service, herded together in front of a long line of empty carriages, mourning carriages, gentlemen's carriages, parading in compliance with etiquette; then came the troops in their turn, and Rue de la Roquette, that long street running through the filthy faubourg, already swarming with people as far as the eye could see, swallowed up a whole army, infantry, dragoons, lancers, carabineers, heavy guns with muzzles in the air, all ready to bark, shaking pavements and window-panes, but unable to drown the rolling of the drums, a sinister, barbarous sound, which transported Felicia's imagination to the obsequies of African monarchs, where thousands of immolated victims attend the soul of a prince so that it may not enter the kingdom of spirits alone, and made her think that perhaps that ostentatious, interminable procession was about to descend and disappear in a supernatural grave vast enough to hold it all.
And by him that spake only as a philosopher and natural man, it was well said, Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa. Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible.
We are longing to make bread, which takes up a great deal of our factotum's time, as it has to be set over night and kneaded three or four times the following day; but are begged to defer that amusement until within a few days of our departure, as it would so entirely upset our American trip if we had to attend A 's obsequies. The bread is perfectly delicious, so light and so white in colour.
She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt 'well' and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.
Neither at the obsequies nor at the offerings might the ministers of the gods be absent, and the silent City of the Dead was regarded as a favored sanctuary in which to establish schools and dwellings for the learned.
But in her wardrobe there were two such gowns, one of which was apparently blacker than the other, nearer to a guise of widowhood, more fit, at any rate, for general funereal obsequies. There are women who seem always to be burying someone; and Mrs. Bolton, as she went forth to visit her daughter, was fit to bury any one short of her husband.
His death caused infinite grief to his country, which recognized and esteemed him much more when dead than it had done when he was alive; and he was buried with the most honourable obsequies and distinctions in S. Maria del Fiore, although his burial-place was in S. Marco, under the pulpit opposite to the door, where there is a coat of arms with two fig-leaves and certain green waves on a field of gold, because his family came from the district of Ferrara, that is, from Ficaruolo, a township on the Po, as it is shown by the leaves, which denote the place, and by the waves, which signify the river.
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