Hors d’Œuvre

THE BARBARIANS

All day long, the public filed past the body of the great writer. The brain was removed.
Anatole France repeatedly expressed the desire to be buried without flowers, without speeches, without any pomp, in the small cemetery of Saint-Cyr...
THE NEWSPAPERS.
We have a strange way of respecting our dead. The more respectable a dead person is, the more we strive to lavish them with marks of public profanation... A dead person is intimate. A dead person imposes silence, pain, obscurity, oblivion if one can forget, memory if he has deserved to survive in hearts... But, while waiting for the stone to be sealed, we indulge in indecent demonstrations that would revolt a truly spiritualist people.

A great conscience has disappeared; the flame is extinguished... There remains... In truth, there is nothing left on the material plane, or rather there remains something that must quickly disappear. English writers never refer to a body that life has abandoned by its living name; they do not write "the corpse"; they write "the thing"!... It is no longer a being, the being is elsewhere... And it is a betrayal of what was to make what remains serve a public exhibition and to deliver "the thing" to a curiosity camouflaged under the mask of piety.

The doctors have "removed the brain" of our beloved master. It is fair to point out that doctors do not respect much. If the body of a man of genius is made available to them, they believe themselves authorized to the same priviledges that they practice on the body of the victim of an assassination or on the body of the presumed assassin. Their curiosity is scientific... You claim that the removal of the brain, put in a separate box, is an exceptional homage paid to a great man? You claim so and you are perhaps right. Each people has its customs. On the banks of the Congo, there are tribes who eat the heart of the valiant warrior killed by the enemy, in such a way that the virtues of the dead are absorbed and assimilated by the surviving consumer.

Our master wanted to rest in a small cemetery in Tours, after having discreetly made his last journey. His glory does not allow it; his glory imposes on him a noisy departure, a triumphant journey, an innumerable escort and superfluous speeches. He wanted to live apart from the impious crowd. But he died, and the crowd, too pious, seized him.

I think of the death of another great writer. A very great writer, who died very poor and very abandoned... Three friends stayed by his body, very appropriately, because they were able to club together to give money to the funeral director, who, sensing poverty, wanted to take the coffin away, unless he was paid immediately.

Until now I could not think without a shudder of revolt about the death of Laurent Tailhade.
But today it seems to me that Laurent Tailhade had the best part, the one he himself had chosen.

G. DE LA FOUCHARDIÈRE.

Laurent Tailhade