Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. IX.—February, 1851.—Vol. II.. Various
of a subterraneous passage, and the darkness made visible by the uncertain lamp of our conductor. We arrive at a low doorway, and bend to pass beyond it. This is the place. At first we see nothing; our eyes, however, soon become accustomed to the obscurity, and a strange spectacle is disclosed to them. We find we are standing in a round and vaulted chamber of rough masonry: it resembles an inverted bowl, the spring of its arch being but a little above the floor; this floor is of uneven earth, and may be some twenty feet in diameter. Round the walls, and supported in a standing position, are a great number of human bodies. There are ninety in all. We are in a large company of the dead; and the ground on which we tread is composed of hundreds more, for that whitish dust is the dust of bones, and the original bottom of the pit is many feet below.
The fact is, as the guide informs us, that a cemetery near the church having been disturbed, the vault was made the receptacle of the remains found in it. As for the bodies piled round its sides, some peculiar property of the spot in which they were originally deposited had preserved them entire; and such as they now are they will probably remain, for some of them were living six hundred years ago. Their flesh has been transformed into a substance resembling tinder; the skin has much shrunk, and has become brown, so that they resemble very thin mulattoes, but, in most other respects, they are scarcely changed. Many of them still possess all their teeth; their hair remains – one has a long beard. The expression their countenances wore in death is still perfectly distinct. They are of both sexes and of all ages, and, consequently, of every size. The histories of a few are known. In the case of most, you can read something of their past lives in their faces and forms, as you can in those of the living, so completely does their physiognomy retain the impress of the passions which once moved and agitated them. One is the body of a man who was a street porter in his time: it is fully seven feet high. He was renowned for his strength, but broke his back one day about a hundred years back, under a burden too heavy for him. Another presents the features of a singularly beautiful and graceful woman who died of cancer. On a third body, you remark the nun's dress in which the poor inmate of the cloister was interred. Her face still wears a look of sadness and melancholy resignation. You see in the breast of one man the sword-thrust wound which had caused his death. The most painful to behold is the body of a young boy, the convulsed contraction of whose features and members presents a frightful appearance of moral as well as of physical agony. Some medical men have given it as their opinion that this unhappy being had been buried alive, and that it was in his frenzied efforts to burst his cerements that his limbs stiffened into their present horrid aspect. Speaking of medical men, there is one of their fraternity in the collection, an old doctor, who thus shares the tomb, it may be, of some of those whom he, perhaps, helped to send to it.
Such are the mummies of Bordeaux. As to the cause of the phenomenon, we can offer no explanation, though more learned men than we will, doubtless, easily find many. We trust, however, that such may be more reasonable than that offered by an author before us, who ascribes the preservation of the bodies to the heat of the climate. The guide, of course, has his own theory. A baker had his oven close to the place in which they were at first interred, and the heat of the said oven petrified them. But, whatever may be the proper solution of the question, St. Michael's church at Bordeaux is not the only locality which possesses such a curiosity, though none that we are aware of can boast a museum so complete. Similar discoveries are said to have been made at Toulouse, under a Franciscan, and also under a Dominican monastery, but we must say that, when in that town, we never heard of them. We have, however, ourselves seen the bodies preserved in a crypt of the cathedral church of Bremen. This crypt is called the Bleikeller, or lead-cellar, for what precise reason we do not remember. It is not entirely underground, but enjoys a certain dubious daylight. The mummies here are contained in rough wooden coffins, and are attired in the usual vestments of the dead, but with their faces exposed. Each has its history, which the respectable lady who showed them to us duly recounted, removing each coffin-lid as she did so, and replacing it as she passed to another. As at Bordeaux, one of them had been slain by the sword; he was a student who fell in a duel. Another was the body of an English lady of the name of Stanhope. If we bore that name, we should take measures to prevent her remains being thus made a show of.
Since we are speaking of Bremen, we may mention another object, of a somewhat similar kind, which that town possesses. Gesche Gottfried was a female prisoner, a modern Brinvilliers. She poisoned her husband (two husbands, unless we are mistaken), some of her children, and several of her friends and relatives. At last, in an attempt to poison a young man, to whom she was about to be married, she was detected, condemned, and decapitated. This was a few years back, and they have now got her head, preserved in spirits, in the Bremen Museum.
RECOLLECTIONS OF CHANTREY, THE SCULPTOR
Of Chantrey the recorded life and character are eminently simple and compact. Easy of comprehension is the tenor of both. The one was marked by steady common-sense; the other by progressive success. Chantrey was born at Norton, in Derbyshire, in 1782. The son of one of the few remaining small proprietors cultivating their own land, he received a moderate education, and was apprenticed, at his own instance, to a working wood-carver. Every onward step was marked by native sagacity. His natural gifts led him to the more ambitious branches of art. He began with portrait-painting. But his craft of wood-carving, securing, as it did, a subsistence, he did not relinquish till his position as sculptor was assured: a wise plan, since for eight years he, according to his own account, scarce realized £5 by modeling. He began with an imaginative effort or so, but soon found his legitimate field. With the £10,000 brought him by his wife in 1811, he provided himself with house, studio, offices, marble, &c., like a prudent speculator. From the epoch of his bust of Horne Tooke – an important patron to him – dates his success. This brought him into notice. Commissions thenceforward flowed in. The remainder of his life was a course of regular labor, relieved by constant hospitality and the periodic relaxation of country visits, and his favorite amusement, angling: interspersed with such occurrences as the visit to Italy; a few other continental trips; the erection, at a cost of £20,000, of a new house and offices, adapted to the growing largeness of his dealings, and his knighthood. With characteristic shrewdness, he early avoided committing himself to any political or party opinions. This, his prosperity, and his common-sense rendered him a great favorite with the English aristocracy. But too often, indeed, is the inane world of aristocratic Dilettantism felt hovering dimly near, as we read these pages. His large income and social disposition induced him to keep a hospitable house. And it was part of his tact to secure, without much reading, varied average knowledge, by frequent intercourse with men of science and letters. During the last two years of his life, his health rapidly and wholly gave way: the ordinary fate of his class, the hard workers and social livers. He was in the maturity of middle age, on his sudden death in 1841.
This course is as much that of a man of business as of an artist. Yet Chantrey's was a truly estimable, though no exalted, or rare character. There was a native dignity, a reality, an English genuineness about the man, legible in his whole life, and very engaging; even amid the chaotic adumbrations of the present biography. He was a favorable sample of a class not uncommon among us, the prosperous men who have risen through their own efforts, and deservedly. Generous, frank, hearty he was; above all, eminently direct in his dealings and character. One of his distinguishing features as a man, and as one of the class just mentioned, was his honest pride in his origin and progress in life. Without self-complacency, a manly consciousness of his true relations to the world pervaded him. The taint of flunkeyism in his position so facile to catch, touched him not. That respect for the intrinsic and essential, in character and position, his early circumstances naturally inspired, was never forsaken for worship of the privileged caste which favored and surrounded him.
One of those receiving freely and spending freely, he showed his sense of the value of money by its liberal devotion to the enjoyment of himself and all around. Ever open to tales of distress, he was the frequent dupe of his kind impulses. To his brother artists, he was generous in more ways than that of hospitality. Few earning a large income have manifested a better title thereto, by their use of it. In a profession inevitably unequal in the attainment of the prizes of fortune, compensation for the direction of so large a share into one or two fashionable channels, is found in so genial a worldly head of it as Chantrey. His generosity bordered on lavishness; yet even here, his prudence did not wholly forsake him. He left a large property; bequeathed, after Lady Chantrey,