The only private cemetery in Paris is that of Picpus, the entrance to which is in the street of the same name. When the guillotine was transported from the Place de la Revolution to the former barrière de Trône, it became necessary to find in the quarter a place of burial for the victims, and the Commune of Paris selected, on the 26th Prairial, year II, a "piece of ground that had belonged to the so-called canons of Picpus." Here these victims of "the law" were interred, to the number of thirteen hundred and six, all executed between the 14th of June and the 27th of July, 1794; and this _cimetière des guillotinés_ has been preserved as the property of the relatives and friends. It includes the tombs of a number of the most ancient and illustrious families of France, that of General Lafayette, of General de Beauharnais, of the poet André Chénier, of Talleyrand, Montalembert, etc. It was acquired, under the First Empire, by the Prince de Salm-Kirbourg, one of whose ancestors had been buried in the Revolutionary fosse commune; and is open to visitors on payment of a fee of fifty centimes. The victims of the guillotine of the Place de la Concorde were buried in two provisional cemeteries which have disappeared,--one which had served as a kitchen-garden for the Bénédictines in the Rue de la Ville-l'Évêque, and the other near the Folie-Chartres, in the neighborhood of the present Parc Monceau and the Boulevard de Courcelles.
That lugubrious institution, the Morgue, dates from 1714, at least; it was then a low room in the basement of the Châtelet, near the vestibule of the principal stairway, and in the court adjoining was a well, the water of which served to wash the corpses. It was under the care of the _filles hospitalières de Sainte-Catherine_, and was, as may be supposed, a noxious cell in which the bodies, thrown one upon the other, waited to be inspected by the light of lanterns by those searching for missing relatives or friends. In March, 1734, it was thronged with visitors attracted by the unusual presence of some fifteen or sixteen infantile corpses, none of them more than three years of age; it appeared that a celebrated anatomist, Joseph Hunault, had collected these subjects for his investigations, in the house of a surgeon, the affrighted neighbors had complained to the police, who had caused them all to be transported to the Morgue. A police ordinance of August 17, 1804, directed that this establishment be suppressed, and that all bodies drawn from the river or found elsewhere should be taken to the new Morgue on the Marché-Neuf, in the quartier de la Cité. The object of the municipal administration was to secure the recognition of the greatest number possible of these remnants of humanity, and for this purpose they were exposed, for three days at least, behind a glass screen protected by a rail, on inclined tables of black marble, the heads reposing upon a raised piece covered with leather. There was provided a room for the autopsies, containing two dissecting-tables; another for the washing of the garments found on the dead, and a third for those bodies recognized or in which decomposition had proceeded too far to permit of their public exposure. Two attendants were always on duty to receive any bodies that might be brought, at any hour of the day or night.