FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF...
Stand up, the dead!

This Sunday, which has just passed, has brought us a flood of speeches. There has been a bit of talk in all corners of the country. There has been talk about everything and nothing. And, something completely unexpected, Mr. Poincaré, who has become terribly circumspect, was not at the little Sunday party.

But Mr. Maginot was there. Mr. Maginot spoke before the glorious dead of the commune of Islettes. Mr. Maginot uttered some elementary truths as well felt. And, while Mr. Maginot was holding forth at Islettes, Mr. François-Marsal poured out his eloquence on the dead of Gerbeviller, the martyred city. Mr. François-Marsal, too, spoke definitive words. And, while Mr. François-Marsal was developing his harmonious periods, Mr. Raoul Péret was making a speech in front of the dead of Champagne-Saint-Hilaire. Mr. Raoul Péret, like the others, has used up his stock of learned metaphors. And, while Mr. Raoul Péret was letting the honey fall from his lips, other speakers must certainly have been palavering in front of other dead people in other communes…

This abundance of speeches, in front of poor dead people who can do nothing, and would gladly do without all these flowers of rhetoric, is significant.

It must be observed, first, that the speakers are all more or less dead, politically speaking. They are dead people who address the dead. But these dead people are, really, too recalcitrant. They abuse. It is these dead people that must be killed.

Thus, while men act, work, strive to create and life goes on, forgotten ghosts lift coffins from their tombs. What do all these specters want from us? They probably claim an increasingly difficult resurrection. They probably imagine that their stammering and their icy breath can still awaken an echo.

They are completely in their place in front of funerary monuments. They are assured, if not of being heard, at least of not being contradicted… The dead are polite. The dead do not protest.

That is why these gentlemen ministers and presidents, more or less deceased, seek their company more willingly.

In front of an audience of the living, these gentlemen would risk misadventures. With the dead, they feel like family. And, convinced that the living would not listen to them, they inflict on the dead the torture of their eloquence.

We make up for it as best we can. But don't they do better than complain?

SIRIUS.