human
Here at each step we behold, as it were, a golden throne, and while treading on tombs we seem to be on Mount Tabor. Go down, go down into the deep Catacombs, into their lowest recesses--go down, and your {314} heart shall rise and, looking up from these graves, see heaven!
gpt
Christian Rome, and are only a first utterance, should be placed, as an original picture full of meaning, his words concerning the slow and gradual destruction of the human body in the Catacombs. We all know Bossuet's _mot_ (after Tertullian) in speaking of a human corpse:
human
It becomes a something unutterable, he exclaims,
gpt
The following admirable page from l'Abbé Gerbet's book is, as it were, a development and commentary of Bossuet's words. At this first station of the Catacombs he confines himself to the study of the nothingness of life:
human
In your progress you review the various phases of destruction, as one observes the development of vegetation in a botanic garden from the imperceptible flower to large trees, rich with sap and crowned with great blossoms. In a number of sepulchral niches that have been opened at different periods one can follow, in a manner, step by step, the successive forms, further and further removed from life, through which _what is there_ passes before it approaches as closely as possible to pure nothingness. Look, first, at this skeleton; if it be well preserved in spite of centuries, it is probably because the niche where it lies was hollowed out of damp earth. Humidity, which dissolves all other things, hardens these bones by covering them with a crust which gives them more consistency than they had when they were members of a living body. But not the less is this consistency a progress of destruction; these human bones are turning to stone. A little further on is a grave where a struggle is going on between the power that makes the skeleton and the power that makes dust; the first defends itself, but the second is gaining ground, though slowly. The combat between life and death that is taking place in you, and will be over before this combat between one death and another, is nearly ended. In the sepulchre near by, of all that was a human frame nothing is left but a sort of cloth of dust, a little tumbled and unfolded like a small whitish shroud, from which a head comes out. Look, lastly, at this other niche; there is evidently nothing there but simple dust, the color of which even is a little doubtful from its slightly reddish tinge. There, you say, is the consummation of destruction! Not yet. On looking closely, you discern a human outline: this little heap, touching one of the longitudinal extremities of the niche, is the head; these two heaps, smaller and flatter, placed parallel to each other a little lower down, are the shoulders; these two are the knees. The long bones are represented by feeble trails, broken here and there. This last sketch of man, this vague, rubbed-out form, barely imprinted on an almost impalpable dust, which is volatile, nearly transparent, and of a dull, uncertain white, can best give us an idea of what the ancients called a _shade_. If, in order to see better, you put your head into the sepulchre, take care; do not move or speak, hold your breath. That form is frailer than a butterfly's wing, more swift to vanish than a dewdrop hanging on a blade of grass in the sunshine; a little air shaken by your hand, a breath, a tone, become here powerful agents that can destroy in a second what seventeen centuries, perhaps, of decay have spared. See, you breathed, and the form has disappeared. So ends the history of man in this world.