catafalque /KAT-ə-fahlk/. noun. A temporary platform or tomb on which a body is laid in state for a funeral and/or procession. In Roman Catholic funerals, a coffin-shaped object draped with a pall, representing the corpse. From Italian catafalco (same meaning), from Greek kata (down or beside) + fala (scaffolding, or a wooden tower). The Medieval Latin use led to the French chafaud and échafaud (scaffold).
“On the bedcover a gold-embroidered pomegranate pattern shimmered in the dim light of two pendant lamps which, like at a catafalque, shone either side of the bed—Mortimer’s bed. He could easily imagine the outstretched form of the murdered man in the shadow of the baldachin.” (Alexander Lernet-Holenia)
“…they had seen German corpses sinking beneath the water or sailing toward the mouth of the river on their icy catafalques.” (Primo Levi)
“Because of the frost, rigor mortis stiffened his body so quickly that he ended up lying on his catafalque with his dead fingers gripping his watch, which ticked loudly, to the embarrassment of those attending the funeral.” (Magdalena Tulli)
“Poor Snow White. She wasn’t very comfortable anywhere else; not in her stepmother’s castle, not in her glass catafalque, not in whatever place her awakening prince lugged her off to.” (Jane Urquhart)
“The catafalque, which time and again threatened to topple over, was borne on a huge golden bier on the shoulders of a hundred and twenty-four hand-picked pallbearers.” (W.G. Sebald)
“A squashed mosquito on his windshield. Whitby’s anguished face. The swirling light of the border. The director’s phone in his satchel. Demonic videos housed in a memorial catafalque. Details were beginning to overwhelm him. Details were beginning to swallow him up.” (Jeff VanderMeer)
“For the next forty-eight years Mrs T. (or ‘Big Bertha,’ as the hospital staff too now called her) continued to lie in Parkinsonian state, rigid, mute, motionless, and glaring, upon her specially reinforced catafalque of a bed, attended by relays of diminutive nurses.” (Oliver Sacks)
“The air smelt of woodsmoke and perfume and the room, dim and mysterious, struck Cordelia as smaller and more luxurious than in its daytime brightness. But the bed was more than ever dominant, glowing under its scarlet canopy, sinister and portentous as a catafalque.” (P.D. James)
“Let the orchestras rehearsing for the feast be made up of strange instruments, whose mere sound prompts tears. Let the servants be clad in sober liveries of unknown colours; let them be lavish yet simple, like the catafalques of heroes.” [alternate version in notebooks, ‘catafalques of suicides.’]” (Fernando Pessoa)