one 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