Charles NODIER (1780-1844). Autograph manuscript, Cimetière - Lot 124

Charles NODIER (1780-1844). Autograph manuscript, Cimetière des Innocents; 1page oblong in-8. Note for the book Paris historique. Promenade dans les rues de Paris (1838-1839), commenting on an illustration. "This immense market, watered by the most elegant of our fountains, a masterpiece by the chisel of Jean Goujon, was in the Middle Ages a hideous cemetery, enclosed by a stone wall, half of which had been built at the expense of the Maréchal de Boucicaut, and the other half at the expense of the famous calligrapher, Nicolas Flamel"... Nodier describes the mass graves, where the "privileged dead" were daily rubbed shoulders with fashionable merchants and their stalls, until night turned them into a horrible desert... He recalls the exhumation of the skeletons in 1785, and concludes on a more literary note: "The English, masters of Paris, had chosen this cemetery, in 1484, to give a feast, or rejoicing of the battle of Verneuil. They danced the Danse Macabre, a type of entertainment very well suited to this theater. A century and a half later, the English would probably have performed Hamlet there"...