A report is to the present system of administration what limbo or hades is to Christianity.  Jacquet knew very well the mania for “reports”; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that bureaucratic absurdity.  He knew that since the invasion into public business of the Report (an administrative revolution consummated in 1804) there was never known a single minister who would take upon himself to have an opinion or to decide the slightest matter, unless that opinion or matter had been winnowed, sifted, and plucked to bits by the paper-spoilers, quill-drivers, and splendid intellects of his particular bureau.  Jacquet—­he was one of those who are worthy of Plutarch as biographer—­saw that he had made a mistake in his management of the affair, and had, in fact, rendered it impossible by trying to proceed legally.  The thing he should have done was to have taken Madame Jules to one of Desmaret’s estates in the country; and there, under the good-natured authority of some village mayor to have gratified the sorrowful longing of his friend.  Law, constitutional and administrative, begets nothing; it is a barren monster for peoples, for kings, and for private interests.  But the peoples decipher no principles but those that are writ in blood, and the evils of legality will always be pacific; it flattens a nation down, that is all.  Jacquet, a man of modern liberty, returned home reflecting on the benefits of arbitrary power.

When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to deceive him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave his bed.  The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial dinner that same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing to burn his wife after the manner of the Romans.  The clubs of Paris took up the subject, and talked for a while of the burials of antiquity.  Ancient things were just then becoming a fashion, and some persons declared that it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for distinguished persons, the funeral pyre.  This opinion had its defenders and its detractors.  Some said that there were too many such personages, and the price of wood would be enormously increased by such a custom; moreover, it would be absurd to see our ancestors in their urns in the procession at Longchamps.  And if the urns were valuable, they were likely some day to be sold at auction, full of respectable ashes, or seized by creditors,—­a race of men who respected nothing.  The other side made answer that our ancestors were much safer in urns than at Pere-Lachaise, for before very long the city of Paris would be compelled to order a Saint-Bartholomew against its dead, who were invading the neighboring country, and threatening to invade the territory of Brie.  It was, in short, one of those futile but witty discussions which sometimes cause deep and painful wounds.  Happily for Jules, he knew nothing of the conversations, the witty speeches, and arguments which his sorrow had furnished to the tongues of Paris.