Previously they had remained freely and legally open.
This was indeed their true history: cemeteries four centuries old becoming places of asylum, ravaged at times during the persecutions; afterwards held in veneration till the eighth century; then despoiled of their holy relics, and subsequently blocked up and forgotten, so that they remained buried during more than seven hundred years, people thinking of them so little that at the time of the first searches in the fifteenth century they were considered an extraordinary discovery--an intricate historical problem--one, moreover, which only our own age has solved.
"Please stoop, mesdames," resumed the Trappist.

"In this compartment here is a skeleton which has not been touched.

It has been lying here for sixteen or seventeen hundred years, and will show you how the bodies were laid out.

Savants say that it is the skeleton of a female, probably a young girl.

It was still quite perfect last spring; but the skull, as you can see, is now split open.