represent the judgment of the soul, the good and evil deeds of which
are weighed before Osiris and the forty-two judges, and thus he has
mastered the mysterious beliefs of the Egyptians on the question of the
future life. The soul, whether it was conducted to Amenti or driven into
the infernal regions--that is, towards the West--by the dog-headed
monkeys, who appear to have been a sort of daemons charged with the
carrying out of sentences,--the soul was, nevertheless, not freed from
all connection with the body; its relative immortality depended in some
sort upon the integrity of the latter; the alteration, the deprivation
of one of the limbs was supposed to be felt by the soul, the form of
whose impalpable spectre would have been mutilated and could not have
traversed, wanting a leg or an arm, the cycle of migrations or
metempsychoses. Hence the religious care taken of the human remains, the
infallible methods and the minute precautions of the embalmers, the
perfect solidity and the secret location of the tombs, of which the
priests alone possessed the plan, the constant thought of eternity in
death which characterised in so striking a manner the ancient Egyptians
and makes them a nation apart, incomprehensible to modern nations, which
are generally so eager to give back to the earth and to cause to
disappear the generations which have preceded them.

During his long and intimate acquaintance with Egypt, M. Ernest Feydeau,
who is not only an archaeologist but also a poet, after he had sounded
the mysteries of the old kingdom of the Pharaohs, became passionately
attached to that art which the Greek ideal--which nevertheless is
indebted to it for more than one lesson--has caused us to despise too
much. He has understood, both as a painter and a sculptor, a beauty
which is so different from our own standard and which is yet so real.

Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, seems to him as beautiful as the Venus of
Milo. Without entirely sharing that feeling, I confess to admiring
greatly the clean outline, so pure, so slender, and so full of life. In
spite of the hieratic restrictions which did not allow the consecrated
attitude to be varied, art shows out in more than one direction. There
is a beauty of a strange and penetrating charm foreign to our own habits
in the heads with their delicate profiles, their great eyes made larger
by the use of antimony, the somewhat thick lips with their faint, dreamy
pout, or their vague smile res