A CEMETERY THAT BEWILDERS

 A CHURCH AND CEMETERY APPEAR IN THE OPEN SPACE JUST BEYOND THE WALL

(TOWARD 1150)

The Cemetery toward 1550 as imagined by Hoffbauer, mentioned on the preceding page

The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents by Jacob Grimer, 16th century / zoom

"SNF..." [snif] refers to the smell from the open graves:

Adapted from a graphic novel / zoom

Yet the cemetery was a place for shopping, fêtes, quarrels, flirts... 

Pea-shellers of the Halle by Etienne Jeaunet, 18th century / zoom 

"The dead were sheltered by the living.

On every tomb sellers of ribbons, laces, trinkets.

Merchants spread out their wares while smiling at the client...  

"Never had death been so familiar; the handsome idle of the time constantly besieged those counters of a new kind. One flirted in the charnal house as at a market, planned to meet there as at the Tuileries [... ]"...

-- The Streets of Paris, ed. Kugelman, 1844, zoom (in French)

# # #

The crowd provided an initiation site for thieves who hoped to join the Court of Miracles...

Chasing Pariahs (in French),  zoom

• The candidate would steal a purse and flee. His potential comrades would cry "thief!" and join the crowd, helping to chase, catch and beat him, stealing all the while. If he escaped with their help, they would  all celebrate his joining the Court. 

• If he was caught he was hanged. 

  -- The Court of Miracles, 2020 (in French, unsigned)  

Adapted from a plan of 1760 / zoom

A historical novel begins:

"At that time [1738], 

towns stank in a way unimaginable for us

The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairs of moldy wood and rat excrement, the kitchens of rotting cabbage and sheep fat: Badly aired rooms stank of dust, bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp bedspreads and the bitter mustiness of chamber pots. Fireplaces spat a sulfurous stink, tanning establishments the stench of their corrosive baths, and slaughterhouses the stench of curdled blood. People stank from sweat and unwashed clothes : The mouths stank from rotted teeth, their stomachs stank from onions and their bodies from old cheese and sour milk and eruptive tumors. The rivers stank, the squares stank, the churches stank, it stunk under the bridges and in palaces. [...]

Naturally it was in Paris that the stench was greatest, for Paris was the biggest town of France. And in the center of the capital was a place where stench reigned in a way that was particularly infernal [...] that was the cemetery of the Innocents. For eight hundred years [...] day after day corpses had been carried by the dozen and thrown them into long ditches, for eight hundred years they had filled the successive layers of charnel houses and ossuaries." 

-- Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, 1985

But stink was omnipresent — 

one smelled Paris from three days away. 

It could make visitors ill,

but residents were used to it.

 

Death too was constant. 

But what counted was eternal life,

and dying was terrible only when it happened

outside the rites of the Church.

And there was no other large public space

in the center of town.

*    *    *

Next,

The Court of Miracles