# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 7/Down among the dead men

DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN.
The western and southern portions of Continental Europe, in which the Latin race predominates, hardly contain a cemetery that can be called of gloomy aspect. The crypt of St. Denis could have never produced the unpleasant impression, which makes the flesh creep, that is felt on entering the Royal vault at Windsor, or “the heroes’ vault” beneath St. Paul’s. The recently exhumed sepulchres of Etruria look more like a fine art collection than anything else; and totally fail, if it ever was intended that they should have done otherwise, to impress the visitor with a sentiment of anything approaching either awe or disgust. The Roman urns in the Louvre and Campana Museum form a beautiful contrast to the Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi beside them. It may be said of the Latin family, whether in ancient Rome or grafted on the Gallic stock, that far from being repelled by death, they seemed rather to be attracted towards it. The French, who are descended from them, show no tendency to invest death with anything that is horrible. The ceremonies and pageants got up by the “Compagnie des Pompes Funèbres,” are simply dingy. Far from the Latinised Gauls be anything approaching a Valhalla! In their notions of a “hereafter,” they take entirely after their Roman ancestors, whose dead were provided with Elysian fields, and who cared no more about putting an end to their lives, than the Neapolitan brigand does to put an end to his neighbour’s. What Frenchman can be frightened by a funeral or a funeral sermon into any fear of or belief in eternity of punishment? The very notion of such a thing is to him supremely ridiculous. He might as easily be frightened by a ghost-story. The Catholic Church hardly ventures to put mortality prominently forward in dealing with Voltaire’s countrymen, not even when dealing with those who are not, in religious matters, greatly given to scepticism. If perchance any of them accept as an article of faith the terrors of the other world, the crowded Morgue contradicts them flatly, or accuses them of self-deception. The whole tendency of the soi-disant philosophy across the Channel is to prove death to be an inevitable crisis, for the purpose of effecting a certain modification of one’s being. The tomb-stones and the grave-stones inculcate a similar belief, although nobody intended that they should have ever done so. Mrs. Stowe was more inclined to laugh and be satirical when visiting the vaults of the Pantheon, than to moralise or grow sad, and who ever felt sorry but for the living when visiting Père la Chaise? That vast graveyard is not the least gay looking of the many gay sights which strike the attention of the stranger during his first visit to the Imperial city. Montmartre is no less so; and avenues, shaded by yew and cypress, fail to give solemnity to the flat cemetery of Mount Parnassus. Even the absence of sunshine and the presence of subterranean gloom do not render the catacombs so awfully sepulchral, as they would certainly be in regions inhabited by the Scandinavian Slave, or Saxon. There is a geometrical precision, a scientific classification, an artistic design about the piles of skulls, thigh bones, shin bones, and all the bones that form the human skeleton, ranged as they are, row above row, and forming the surface of endless galleries, that gives a very opposite impression to that occasioned by the disorder and decay in which we invariably invest mortality.
The yellow immortelles, beady circlets, and divers other devices of French fancy, hanging on crosses or lying at their bases, impart a certain liveliness to the provincial churchyards, into the precincts of which the bat and owl hardly venture, although the beetle is heard in them as frequently as the grasshopper. So striking is their cheerfulness of aspect that they give the lie to the ci-git upon the tombstones, and rather tend to bear out the theories of Lamennais or Père Enfantin than those of Calvin or the Trappists.
But this rule is not without its exceptions; and as exceptions are always more note-worthy than the tame things governed by rules, of them we shall henceforth deal. Clamart may be considered the representative one of France, as are, for very different reasons, the caves of Palermo in Sicily. Victor Hugo, in his “Last Days of a Condemned,” has told the world how the first is exclusively reserved for those whose mortal bodies escape by a natural death from the jail or the penitentiary, or whose mutilated remains have found their way from the amphitheatre of medicine, after being sent to it from the hospital or the guillotine.
Long and wide strips of rank grass, running parallel to each other, and stretching across a wall enclosed hill-side, mark the common ditch into which the pauper, or the malefactor, are together tumbled. A gigantic wooden cross of ghastly white colour, and an equally ghastly whitewashed chapel, provided by the paternal care of a government solicitous for the welfare of the dead, that were, when living, left to perish, increase rather than diminish the dreary uniformity of this Aceldama. Strips of faded green again divide the bands of unpleasantly rank verdure which mark the common grave of the miserable outcasts of society. They are parched by the easterly winds that blow across the dreary plain, which this hill-side cemetery faces. So are a few stunted cypresses in the neighbourhood of the chapel. That building never held within its walls a Sunday congregation, or witnessed a wedding, or a christening. It is destitute of bell, or belfry; and its oblong quadrilateral door only opens at break of day, and closes before the rising sun has chased aside the grey mist of morning. During that short period a hurried prayer is said, and a mass mumbled in the presence of a few hard-faced men, dressed in semi-military livery, who look like sheriffs’ officers, and stand beside clumsy deal boxes laid on wooden stretchers.
Yet this chapel has less frequently resounded to the sob, than to the echo of unfeeling laughter. Nobody, in all probability, ever yet shed a tear in it. But could tears recall the dead to life, to shed them would have been an act which the occupants of the boxes would, most likely, have resented. Still, if the Ci-git on the huge white cross be no vain word, how miserable should they not be, lying on that hill-side of Clamart. An indescribable sense of oppression is aroused by a visit to it. The presence of gendarmes, soldiers, and police ​round the gate immediately before the chapel, add greatly to this impression, and makes one imagine that death does not free the captive, and that the myrmidons of the law still hold him in their iron clutches.
But in these days of railway speed we can, dear reader, go from Paris to Palermo without almost feeling the transition too abrupt. We shall there find the other exception in the shape of a sepulchre on a vast scale, where the identity of each body deposited in it is not lost in a ditch into which all are promiscuously thrown. Individualism is a strong feature in it; and the living may, as often as they like, go to contemplate the features of their defunct friends, without having to pass through a file of armed soldiers. Let us enter then, warned, however, of what we are about to see, by the inscription which is placed above the principal entrance.
Still, you must not be either shocked or alarmed. The sepulchral caves of the Capuchins at Palermo, may be regarded as a sort of museum for the benefit of those who would preserve from the worms their bones for posterity. For about 4l. sterling, any one who pleases to do so can be deposited in them. The monks to which they belong are truly cosmopolite, and more than catholic. Provided the above mentioned sum be paid them, admittance is refused to nobody, whether from northern, or southern, eastern or western hemisphere—not even, we feel certain, to a Jew, Protestant, Turk, or Pagan. But few living outside the environs of Palermo covet this cheaply purchased privilege. And to this subterranean burying-place the Palermitans are finally carried, as the Parisians are carried finally to Père la Chaise. On entering, it does not strike the stranger as being what it really is; and one wonders to see during several hours, days, or months, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sisters, friends, or fiancées, coming to pray and weep in what might well pass for a dingy, underground, old curiosity shop, where, after they have ceased to lament, or forgotten, their defunct friends, they are laid by another set of mourners.
In Paris one possesses the key of the family vault at Père la Chaise. But in Palermo one unlocks a glazed, or unglazed, and press-like coffin to see a dead relation. Instead of crowning crosses with wreaths of flowers, in that Sicilian city, the mummies are treated to a new suit of clothes on the anniversary of their patron saint, or All Souls morning. But, as elsewhere, these mementos become rarer each year, and finally cease to show themselves.
The Capuchin Brothers are the overseers and guardians of this strange necropolis, and have as much the parched and shrivelled look of mummies, as any hung about the walls, or ranged along them in glazed cases. About one hundred and fifty live by officiating in that capacity. Their duty partly consists in saying a few short prayers. But their chief occupation is in receiving the living and the dead, labelling the latter, dusting the cases; and, above all, exhibiting them.
The different members of this confraternity seem the negation of everything living; and were it not that they speak and move, might easily pass for what they are employed to mind. Pride is not a besetting sin among them, nor cleanliness a remarkable virtue. They are less intelligent than cicerones generally; far less talkative, and not so strongly tempted by the demon covetousness. They do not sell their services nor their prayers very dearly; and, for three or four halfpence, the simple fellows escort the visitor to his vehicle without, imploring all the saints in his behalf, and make a thousand promises to show any friend he should consign to their guidance every curiosity confided to their safe keeping, and to bring him all round their conventual necropolis.
That strange development of the spirit which in Egypt caused the Pyramids to be constructed was first consecrated as a burying-place in 1484. It is situated close to the principal gate of Palermo, and in one of its most fashionable outlets. Its aspect from without is dismal in the extreme; and vast buildings that would be horribly uniform, were they not falling into ruins, rise above it. In the walls are little loop-holes, which serve as windows for the monks. Extending the whole way beneath these buildings are the subterranean caves which are excavated and constructed something like the ordinary wine-vaults of wholesale wine-merchants, or a branch of the Custom-house vaults of London. A disagreeable, earthy smell, however, is the only one that makes itself felt, and a shrivelled monk in brown frock and cowl replaces the stout and red-nosed cooper. Instead of broaching a barrel of champagne, sherry, or St. Julien’s claret, he points to a piece of defunct humanity; and dead men’s names, with the dates of their death, replace the ages and the names of the different vintages which are most prized by the epicure.
On first entering, nothing is to be seen but the dead monks, the place of honour being awarded to them, and thus some compensation made for their forced humility when among the living. But the poor fellows have not been treated to glass-fronted cases nor to changes of raiment since the day they were brought there from the vault for drying corpses. Their habits—whenever dust does not thickly coat them—are from brown faded into foxy red, and only leave the skull, the feet and hands naked. A cord or a leather strap is passed round the neck of each, and by it he is nailed, hooked, or otherwise suspended from the walls.
Three long galleries are thus occupied. But, on gaining the fourth, one altogether falls into the company of laics, who are, when not in presses, hooked up along the wall in the same manner as the churchmen. In the lofty galleries, which sometimes measure sixteen feet in height, there are often, between floor and ceiling, three rows of corpses. The bare and fleshless—or occasionally well-shod feet—of the third and second clatter against the bare and fleshless skulls of those beneath; and sometimes a cranium, that is more thrown back than the others, supports the burthen of an entire foot which has dropped from the ancle of its original possessor.
The uniform equality displayed at Clamart cannot, therefore, be complained of at Palermo, where distinctive marks of caste, and relative inferiority and superiority of social position, cannot be even banished from among the tombs.
​Of all the spectres to be met with there—the spectres of departed fashions are certainly the most startling to the visitor. None but respectably, or at least decently clad bodies are admitted to take up in the Capuchin caves a permanent abode. There, are orange-girls in their peculiar costume; fishermen and bateliers in theirs; gentlemen in black cloth coats and trousers, patent leather boots, and white gloves,—just as they were in the habit of appearing at evening-parties or appeared on their own wedding-days. But they have, above all, the mourning dinginess of men got up to attend a funeral in a professional capacity; and those of inferior birth, who are ranged along the floor, are not less common-looking in their way than the famous Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse was in his. The dingy finery of the ladies is frightful to behold, and a grinning skeleton crowned with flowers, or a fleshless neck and arms surrounded with embroidery and laces, are not inviting objects.
Nor are the fashions of the year One, the sixty years after, or the three hundred years before, suggestive of grace and life when preserved in the charnel-house. Dante, would have turned away with loathing from his Beatrice, could he have seen her in such a place; and the ghostly guides tell how some excitable Sicilian sailors, returning from distant voyages and finding their loved ones in it, have, from visiting them, been taken raging lunatics to the prison, where madmen, banditti, and political offenders for ages past have been confined together.
Disorder is a feature that adds to the ghastliness of this spectacle. The Catacombs of Paris are for a contrary reason the reverse, and present no horrible feature, even when illuminated by electricity for photographic experiments. Were Disderi to transport his electric battery and photographic apparatus to the Caves of the Capuchins, what odious pictures would he not bring away? Anyone seeing them who has read “Frankenstein,” and accused Mrs. Shelley of exaggeration, would speedily retract the charge. The Sicilian monks, much as they are inclined to respect caste, are not so much inclined as the equality-loving Frenchman to classification. The former would break the hearts of naturalists, or set them momentarily in towering passions were they appointed the Curators of the great museums of the world. Their charges are very badly arranged, and quite at sixes and sevens. Somebody who was alive and flourishing when Garibaldi chased Bombalino, leans languidly on a skeleton that may have been covered with ruddy flesh and lusty sinew when Masaniello attempted to revolutionise Southern Italy. A woman may be found in the middle of a file of men; and a man heading a couple of dozen women. The children are not by themselves, but are placed here and there among the adults, and sometimes manage to turn themselves heels upwards, as if turning a summersault. And the whole spectacle is calculated to give humility to the monks who contemplate it daily.
No natural history museum, even though it were filled with the stuffed skins of all the venomous reptiles which Saint Patrick exiled from the Emerald Isle, or the monsters of the brute creation to be found elsewhere, could present so much of what is hideous, as the collection which the Capuchins so piously watch over. Glass fills the eyeless holes in the heads of the occupants of zoological museums with as much success as dentistry stops the gaps that age, disease, or accidental causes make in the mouths of human beings. But false eyes are not always introduced into the Palermitan caves, and we shall presently see with what effect whenever they are. Ranges of heads, with pairs of round bottomless holes are therefore to be met at every turn. Noses do not either remain in a respectable state of preservation; and before they are three months in the caverns, when not subjected to the drying process in all its details, the under parts of them generally drop off, leaving behind ugly and abrupt excrescences, a thousand times more removed from beauty, than the remains of a nose which cancer leaves after carrying off the cartilaginous portion. The dead men’s lips are endowed with greater tenacity; they stick to the gums long after the other features have disappeared. But they dry up quickly, and are pulled tightly across the face, sometimes making horribly visible mouthfuls of dazzlingly white teeth, sometimes teeth yellow and decayed; and often boneless or boney gums. Neither does the skin of the face quickly abdicate its place, although colour and softness disappear immediately after death. The former looks as though it were glued to the bones beneath. Sometimes it gets torn, and hangs about like leather binding on old and tattered books, or paper that damp has detached from a mouldy wall.
A fleshless skeleton is a beautiful object in the midst of skinny corpses; and a bare skull is loveliness itself when compared to one provided with a luxuriant head of hair. But fortunately, that fairest ornament of woman is, after her eyes, the first to desert her; and when nine or ten months are passed in the ordinary vaults, the heads of all who do so, become as bare as they can be, when caps, hats, and garlands of artificial flowers do not cover them. The hair does not fall by degrees; and baldness shows itself in a manner that would have made the unhappy Bella Bellissima cancel her last will had she visited the caves of Palermo. There it makes its attacks by main force, and in seizing the hair, pulls off, in the most wholesale manner, the scalp along with it.
The glossy forehead advancing high to the coronal region is not to be anywhere met by the visitor; but ragged skulls, sometimes grey, and sometimes of that reddish hue which is seen on a joint-bone divested of its grizzly substance. The scalp falls away in tattered masses, which the weight of tangled locks pulls into irregular forms, or drags down in flaps, over forehead, eyes, and face. Not unfrequently the rents are made from back to front across the centre of the head, and the hair tumbles heavily upon both shoulders, or strays in hideous confusion over breast and arms.
In this Necropolis colour deserts the hair in a very short time. The ebony-black, the fiery red, the sunny flaxen, or the nut-brown tresses, all fade or darken into dingy brown that looks like the faded brown of cast-off wigs which once ​pretended to be dark. A few exceptions are sometimes to be found, for by subjecting the dead to a certain curative process—which costs about ten pounds sterling—the monks can preserve for a longer time the hair, eyes, and a semblance of the flesh which formerly clothed their mummies. Some wealthy belles, who died early, have had by this means their bodies preserved from hideous ugliness; and a few wealthy matrons can, owing to the same cause, pray before defunct babies who in some slight degree recal the faces and the forms which they bore when living. These objects are pointed out with considerable pride by the Capuchins. In them they evidently see so many chefs d’œuvres of art, and with the irresistible tendency of human beings to lavish favours on the well-conditioned, say twice as many prayers for their eternal happiness as they do for their more numerous but less flourishing companions.
The proverb, “What’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” may thus be rendered in Palermo, “What’s poison to the living is preservation to the dead.” Among the Palermitans the arsenic, which in life would destroy, preserves them when dead from decomposition. They are, when able to afford it, carefully washed with soap of arsenic; and a strong preparation of salts of that mineral is injected into them previous to their being dried, and suspended from the walls. Glass eyes are, at considerable expense, stuck into the heads of these mummies. But of all the animal creation men, or women either, are the least becoming when they have departed from the land of the living. The hairy skin and ferocious character of the hyena or the tiger, exhibited in our museums of Natural History, do not allow their false optics to appear unnaturally glaring; but the glass eyes in the caves of Palermo glisten fearfully, and have in them all that wild and aimless stare which so alarmed Macbeth when Banquo’s ghost rose up before him.
By some decree of distributive justice the old, when washed and filled with salts of arsenic, last much longer than the young, and are less revolting to the senses of the visitors. Those who die of age preserve for centuries; but the victims of fever, small-pox, and accidental injuries, consume quickly to mere skeletons if not subjected to every curative process of the monks, and from the difficulty there is in drying them rarely do honour to the fathers’ skill. The same is said of children and of those who are carried off by consumption. The bones of the latter are also very perishable. They rarely last for more than twenty years, and frequently fall into dust in less than half that period.
The disorder already noticed should not be entirely thrown upon the shoulders of the unhappy monks who pass their lives in this Necropolis, the most dismal in the world. In Sicily, as elsewhere, there is a strong desire in the living to be placed when lifeless among their deceased progenitors and kindred. Relations have also their peculiar fancies about the most becoming attitude or posture for defunct friends. Some prefer to see them standing, others suspended, or perhaps sitting. It is therefore utterly impossible to make a general classification according to position, age, sex, or date of entrance. That can only be effected in dealing with those for whom nobody cares, or whose descendants are so far removed by time as to forget all about them.
But there are in Palermo some monks in whose heads the bump of order dominates, and who have preserved in an orderly condition several cases where the occupants are as regularly classified and catalogued as are the pictures in the Louvre or Versailles. The three first galleries contained in them, and exclusively devoted to monks, are submitted to certain regulations never infringed on by the confraternity or any member of it. So are those exclusively set apart for women. The virgins’ galleries are also very methodically arranged. They are well dusted, swept, and garnished, and hung round with walnut-cases, oblong and narrow, which remind one of an old-fashioned eight-day clock. The survivors of these maidens evidently thought that beauty was no vain thing, for in the cases alluded to, there is a curious display of the finery of the toilette. The widows are not in every instance very gaily attired, but the virgins invariably wear crowns of flowers which were once white, and carry palm branches in their hands. They are objects of peculiar veneration; and are prayed to as frequently as they were prayed for by their fellow citizens, although not one of them yet figures in the saintly calendar. White gowns are not the only ones they wear; some are clad in silks or satins or gauzes or tissues, flowered, watered, and brocaded in what were once the brightest colours. Their gauze veils are trimmed with the costliest embroidery, for Palermitan fathers and mothers are more particular about the funeral trousseaux of their children than they are about their wedding garments, and lovers whom death has deprived of their adored ones are allowed to spend their money in buying them handsome clothes. Ardent Sicilians are often to be found in floods of tears contemplating the faces of maidens along with whom they had hoped to have passed their lives, or not unfrequently apostrophising them in the most impassioned manner. A monk always accompanies them whenever they visit the virgins’ gallery. Many are the touching stories which the Capuchins tell of the constancy or ardour of lovers. If they be all true, it would be difficult to say whether constancy or inconstancy is attended in this world with the worst effects, for there are as often among the mummified maidens those who came there because they were the victims of misplaced affection, as those who are followed by despairing men or youths, many of whom very quickly find consolation in the smiles of others, while some end by assuming the cowl and frock for the purpose of passing the rest of their lives in watching, in the quality of Capuchins, the remains of their deceased inamoratas.
Traditions of a romantic tinge are associated with some Violettas, Julias, and Rosalies in walnut cases; but their charm is lost when told in the presence of those whose loveliness, faults, follies, or misfortunes, they hand down to posterity. A rude poem, through which runs the volcanic fire of the south of Europe, celebrates a ​pair of rosy lips, and peculiarly beautiful eyes. But it is powerless to move, while a monk recites it in a sing-song voice, and points out the enormous holes, or glaring orbs of glass that replace those which tempted men to assassinate each other, and occasionally the possessors, for allowing them to shine too softly on some more favoured rival. A woman, whose lips are described as resembling rosebuds, and whose breath is compared to a south wind passing over groves of blossoming orange-trees and myrtles, bears the mark of a poignard on her breast-bone. Yet how far is she not removed from what tradition paints her? The ashes of an extinguished fire are not less capable of calling up an image of expired heat and flame than hers are of giving a notion of her bygone loveliness. The reader will, however, be spared a description of her as she now appears, just as the Capuchins should have spared the sight of her decomposing frame to their disgusted visitors.
She is the last of the modern remains exhibited immediately before passing into the vaults, where no Palermitan can be found who has not been staying in them for less than a couple of hundred years. There is in this antique department, a canon who died in the year 1500. The cicerone always leads the stranger to him on first entering the vaults appropriated to the bi- and tri-centenaries. The one who has by at least sixty-one years the precedence of the latter, is a mummy dry as a piece of parchment. His tongue sticks stiffly out of the middle of a widely opened mouth. It looks as though it had been as carefully smoked as any Yarmouth bloater. The guide makes all the visitors touch it, after touching it himself. He assures them that it was a tongue so eloquent that had not death early silenced it, all Sicily and Italy along with it, would have donned the frock and cowl.
In addition to the feeling of awe, disgust, and horror, is another very different one. The immense number of dead bodies ranged round the walls; their outlandish and dingy garments; their quaint and dusty finery; their strange attitudes; and the universal grin upon the faces of those preserved with arsenic, create a tendency to laugh, or to regard the whole thing as a hideous burlesque on the charnel house. One mummy has a mocking air, another sneers like a Voltaire, or a Mephistopheles; a third seems tired of the company in which he finds himself; and a fourth hangs his head upon his breast, as if in the act of sleeping. Not one among all the thousands in it, looks venerable, or even respectable; and when disgust does not prevent the stranger doing so, there is nothing more frequent than to see him inspecting and handling the dressed dead as one would a stuffed bat or owl in a museum.
We do well to hide our dead, to bury them out of our sight. But the ancients did better to burn them, before the hideous changes of mortality had time to make themselves visible. Their system is repugnant to modern ideas. But after a visit to Palermo, or to a grave-yard, while the sexton is at work, we would feel convinced that for the dead it is the most respectful, and for the living, the least unwholesome. Consigning a friend to the funeral pyre, could prejudice once be surmounted, would certainly be found preferable to consigning him to the worm! and the fire would be less humiliating than the transformations from which mother earth cannot preserve us. In France, the substitution of the urn, instead of the cemetery, is warmly advocated by the majority of the enlightened; the ignorant and the clergy are ready to oppose it. But in doing so the churchmen are mistaken: for the skeleton and death’s-head take little hold on French imaginations; and when they do, it is only to give rise to mocking outbursts, and attacks the reverse of reverent.
Emily Johnstone.