Picpus

A couple quick pictures for today, then I'm off to a jazz club for the night. The pictures are both from Picpus Cemetery, one of the more obscure cemeteries in Paris. It's out past Place de l Nation, and can't be viewed from the road. You wouldn't really know that it's there, unless you go looking for it. The cemetery is very small, and is only really known for two things: it's the mass burial place for nearly 2000 victims of the guillotine during the French revolution (which was set up at Nation, which at that time was called Place du Throne) and their relatives in perpetuity, and it's the burial place for Lafayette, the general who helped the U.S. in the Revolutionary War. The first picture is of Lafayette's grave, and the second I took to use when teaching Wilfrid Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est"--

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

I'll leave you with that cheery thought.