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.

MISTI

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.