Bumbling Blogs, Batman!

In the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, close to the common grave, far from the elegant quartier of this city of sepulchres, far from all those fantastic tombs that show off death’s ghastly fashions in the face of eternity, in a deserted corner, along an old wall, under a great yew tree on which birdwood climbs, among the couch grass and the moss and the bindweed, there is a stone. This stone is no more exempt than the others from the leprosy of time, of mold, of lichen, and of bird droppings. Water turns it green, the air turns it black. It is not near any path and no one likes going over that way, because the grass is high and your feet instantly get wet. When there is a bit of sun, the lizards come out. There is, all around, a rustling of wild oats. In spring, the warblers sing in the tree.
The stone is completely bare. The only idea in cutting it was to meet the bare requirements of a grave, and no further care was taken than to make the stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.
There is no name on it for you to read.
Only, many years ago already, someone’s hand wrote four lines of verse on it in chalk, lines that gradually became illegible under the rain and the dust, and that have probably now been erased:
He sleeps. Though fate for him was truly odd,
He lived. He died when his angel was gone;
This thing just happened of its own accord,
As night comes on when day is done.