Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/274

 PERE LA CHAISE.

��THAT portion of Mont Louis which is appropriated to the most beautiful of the four cemeteries, in the neighborhood of Paris, was originally a part of the garden and pleasure-grounds of Pere la Chaise, the favorite confessor of Louis the Fourteenth, and Mad ame de Maintenon. It covers nearly one hundred acres, and its mixture of funereal foliage and flowers, with the monuments of the dead, is picturesque and imposing. Yet it is less touching in its effect on the feelings, than the labyrinthine solitudes of Mount Auburn, or the sweet spot where the dead repose at Laurel Hill, on the green margin of the Schuylkill, or the still more perfect Greenwood. Forty years have not elapsed since it was set apart for this sacred ser vice. The first corpse was laid here on the 21st of May, 1804 ; since which, in a period of thirty-six years, there have been more than one hundred thousand interments, and sixteen thousand monuments erected. These are in every diversified form, of column, urn, and altar, pyramid, obelisk, and sepulchral chapel ; many of them surrounded by enclosures, within which

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