highest spirits, and consisted of idlers who had come with the
curtained litter from its starting-place, and of all the
reinforcements it had picked up by the way. It set the litter down
in the midst of the Morgue, and then two Custodians proclaimed
aloud that we were all ‘invited’ to go out. This invitation was
rendered the more pressing, if not the more flattering, by our
being shoved out, and the folding-gates being barred upon us.
Those who have never seen the Morgue, may see it perfectly, by
presenting to themselves on indifferently paved coach-house
accessible from the street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left
of the coach-house, occupying its width, any large London tailor’s
or linendraper’s plate-glass window reaching to the ground; within
the window, on two rows of inclined plane, what the coach-house has
to show; hanging above, like irregular stalactites from the roof of
a cave, a quantity of clothes – the clothes of the dead and buried
shows of the coach-house.
We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians
pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the
procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.
Shut out in the muddy street, we now became quite ravenous to know
all about it. Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling,
robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or
decomposed, suicide or murder? All wedged together, and all
staring at one another with our heads thrust forward, we propounded
these inquiries and a hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it came to
be known that Monsieur the tall and sallow mason yonder, was
acquainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow
mason, surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to impart?
It was but a poor old man, passing along the street under one of
the new buildings, on whom a stone had fallen, and who had tumbled
dead. His age? Another wave surged up against the tall and sallow
mason, and our wave swept on and broke, and he was any age from
sixty-five to ninety.
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had
been killed by human agency – his own, or somebody else’s: the
latter, preferable – but our comfort was, that he had nothing about
him to lead to his identification, and that his people must seek
him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him even now? We
liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow,
intense, protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our
handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses. Others of us who had
no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our overwrought
minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on our
sleeves. One man with a gloomy malformation of brow – a homicidal
worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of colour, and a
certain flavour of paralysis pervading him – got his coat-collar
between his teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Several decent
women arrived upon the outskirts of the crowd, and prepared to
launch themselves into the dismal coach-house when opportunity
should come; among them, a pretty young mother, pretending to bite
the forefinger of her baby-boy, kept it between her rosy lips that
it might be handy for guiding to point at the show. Meantime, all
faces were turned towards the building, and we men waited with a
fixed and stern resolution:- for the most part with folded arms.
Surely, it was the only public French sight these uncommercial eyes
had seen, at which the expectant people did not form EN QUEUE. But
there was no such order of arrangement here; nothing but a general
determination to make a rush for it, and a disposition to object to
some boys who had mounted on the two stone posts by the hinges of
the gates, with the design of swooping in when the hinges should
turn.
Now, they turned, and we rushed! Great pressure, and a scream or
two from the front. Then a laugh or two, some expressions of