The following morning at daybreak there was an indescribable
commotion in Etretat. Some insisted that they
had burned a man alive, others that they were trying
to hide a crime, some that the mayor would be put in
jail, others that the Indian prince had succumbed
to an attack of cholera.
The men were amazed, the women indignant. A crowd
of people spent the day on the site of the funeral
pile, looking for fragments of bone in the shingle
that was still warm. They found enough bones to
reconstruct ten skeletons, for the farmers on shore
frequently throw their dead sheep into the sea.
The finders carefully placed these various fragments
in their pocketbooks. But not one of them possesses
a true particle of the Indian prince.
That very night a deputy sent by the government came
to hold an inquest. He, however, formed an estimate
of this singular case like a man of intelligence and
good sense. But what should he say in his report?
The East Indians declared that if they had been prevented
in France from cremating their dead they would have
taken him to a freer country where they could have
carried out their customs.
Thus, I have seen a man cremated on a funeral pile,
and it has given me a wish to disappear in the same
manner.
In this way everything ends at once. Man expedites
the slow work of nature, instead of delaying it by
the hideous coffin in which one decomposes for months.
The flesh is dead, the spirit has fled. Fire which
purifies disperses in a few hours all that was a human
being; it casts it to the winds, converting it into
air and ashes, and not into ignominious corruption.
This is clean and hygienic. Putrefaction beneath
the ground in a closed box where the body becomes
like pap, a blackened, stinking pap, has about it
something repugnant and disgusting. The sight
of the coffin as it descends into this muddy hole
wrings one’s heart with anguish. But the
funeral pyre which flames up beneath the sky has about
it something grand, beautiful and solemn.
I was very much interested at that time in a droll
little woman. She was married, of course, as
I have a horror of unmarried flirts. What enjoyment
is there in making love to a woman who belongs to nobody
and yet belongs to any one? And, besides, morality
aside, I do not understand love as a trade. That
disgusts me somewhat.
The especial attraction in a married woman to a bachelor
is that she gives him a home, a sweet, pleasant home
where every one takes care of you and spoils you,
from the husband to the servants. One finds everything
combined there, love, friendship, even fatherly interest,
bed and board, all, in fact, that constitutes the
happiness of life, with this incalculable advantage,
that one can change one’s family from time to
time, take up one’s abode in all kinds of society
in turn: in summer, in the country with the workman
who rents you a room in his house; in winter with
the townsfolk, or even with the nobility, if one is
ambitious.
