THE pageant seems to have been very grandiose and more then a little stagey. There was enthusiasm, but it might have been of the kind which keeps an expectant audience waiting to secure good seats at the theatre. A less inducement would keep hundreds out all night on the Champs Elysees then the extraordinary spectacle arranged in the centre of the Place de l'Etoile. Description varies respecting the effect of the catafalque and the draping of the Arc de Triomphe which towered above it. French decorative art is said to have failed for once. The monument, though large, is said to have lacked majesty, and to be decorative only in a theatrical sense.
It is, however, difficult to delude the faculties with a sense of the dignity of canvas and cardboard, planks and paint, which were the substance of the structure. Who does not remember Michael Angelo Titmarsh's caustic moralising on the calico goddess and pasteboard and plaster-of-Paris saints and angels set up in the Elysean Fields to grace a transit which, with more of pomp and circumstance and enormously more of national feeling, seems to have been hardly more of a popular celebration then the procession of yesterday? Strained and artificial as the lying in state in many details seems to have been, it had also its solemn and exalted aspects. The proverbial French taste for spectacular arrangement would have degenerated indeed if by any conceivable barbarism it had spoilt the grandeur of the Napoleonic trophy which marks the junction of the Champ Elysees and the Avenue de la Grande Armies. The huge arch, draped in black and towering in the clear obscure of artificial lights above the bier, might have looked on the watches of the night like Azrael, "the dark death angel," himself. This gigantic structure, with the great catafalque lighted up by the torches of the municipal guard, and the resin fires kindled in the urns arranged around, must have formed a picture weird as well as imposing; and so we are assured it did, especially with the silent population passing in a perpetual succession before the velvet path. Night, as Hugo himself says, is the frame for melancholy things, and funereal splendours do not stand the sunshine. The scene in the daytime is described as "anything but solemn"; and besides this, the civilisation which exhibited "the blind hysterics of the Celt" over the death of its most distinguished product had its spade at work and grinding horribly on the dead man's bones, A hundred fellows armed with doubled ladders were allowed to take ground at the arch, where they drove a roaring trade by selling to the multitude penny peeps from the tops of their ladders at the sarcophagus and the body. This profanation, and especially the fact that it was permitted, suggests to cynical minds more forcibly then laboured satire the character of the sentiment which went into mourning for Victor Hugo.
Morning Advertiser, June 2.
Victor Hugo's Funeral
Victor Hugo's Funeral
Table of Contents
Miracles of healing - Christian Miracles or Healing
History of Russia: Christian Versus Barbarian
History of Japan: Early Christian Martyrs
The Jesus of History
The Assyrian Origin of Devil Worshippers
The Christ Of Dogma
The early history of Constantinople
