There is not very much information available concerning this Danse Macabre,--it is known that it was the most important mural painting of the cemetery of the Innocents, and it is now attributed to Jehan d'Orléans, _valet de chambre_ and painter in ordinary to Charles VI, familiar companion of Jean, Duc de Berry. The first record that is known of it is found in the memoirs of a contemporary, printed under the title of _Journal de Paris sous Charles VI et Charles VII, à l'année 1424_, and which gives this "ITEM: _l'an iiiie xxiv fut faite la Danse Macabre à Saint-Innocent, et fut commencée environ le moys d'aoust et achevée au carême ensuivant_,"--begun in August, 1424, and finished in the following Lent. In the library of the city of Grenoble is the only known copy of a work illustrating this painting with wood-cuts,--"_cy finit la dāse macabre imprimée par ung nommé Guy Marchant demeurant en Champ Gaillart à Paris le vingt-huitiesme iour de septembre mil quatre cēt quatre vings et cinq_,"--printed by Guy Marchant, Champ Gaillart, Paris, September 28, 1485. The earliest known wood-engraving is the German one of Saint Christopher, dated 1423,--one year before the execution of the Danse Macabre on the walls of the Innocents. The famous Dance of Death in Bâle was not executed till 1439, and Holbein--to whom it has been attributed--was not born till 1498. The Paris dance is thus much the earlier, and in the reproduction given by Guy Marchant the varying buffoonery of the grotesque figures of death is remarkable,--they laugh, they become astonished, they become enraged,--the "serious contemplation," which they were to inspire, seems far away to our modern eyes, so conventional in their conception only of a conventional horror, silent, menacing, without any shade of humor.
Another image of this mediæval Death has been preserved to our day. This is the small alabaster statue, formerly known as the _Mort Saint-Innocent_; now preserved in the museum of the École des Beaux-Arts. It stood under the fifth arcade, when issuing from the church, in the charnier of "Messieurs les Martins," and had been executed by their order. It was kept enclosed in a box of which the church wardens had the key, and on All-Saints'-day it was exhibited to the people until noon of the next day. Although attributed to Germain Pilon, it is probably anterior to his time, and is now considered to be the work of a sculptor named François Gentil, a native of Troyes. As shown in the illustration, on page 278, it represents a corpse in the process of dissolution, "a much more striking figure than a skeleton;" it is about a mètre in height, stands upright, with a menacing expression, in its right hand it holds the folds of a shroud or winding-sheet, while the left rests upon the top of a species of shield on which is engraved the following quatrain, which was indicated by a dart placed between the fingers of the left hand: