sun of
convalescence destroys the most unbearable memories of the chamber of
pain. But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the
evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a
reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death
alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of
science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse
death because it puts an end to them.

V

THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE
ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE

In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life,
the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of
men. Now what we most dread is the awful struggle at the end and
especially the hateful moment of rupture which we shall perhaps see
approaching during long hours of helplessness and which suddenly hurls
us, disarmed, abandoned and stripped, into an unknown that is the home
of the only invincible terrors which the human soul has ever felt.

It is twice unjust to impute the torments of that moment to death. We
shall see presently in what manner a man of to-day, if he would remain
faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into
which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last
struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is
the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and
horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility
of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already
greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the
sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider
it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most
excruciating convulsions of the most hopeless agony. Who has not, at
a bedside, twenty times wished and not once dared to throw himself at
their feet and implore them to show mercy? They are filled with so
great a certainty and the duty which they obey leaves so little room
for the least doubt that pity and reason, blinded by tears, curb their
revolt and shrink back before a law which all recognize and revere as
the highest law of human conscience.

VI

THE MISTAKE OF THE DOCTORS IN
PROLONGING THE PANGS OF DEATH

One day, this prejudice will strike us as barbarian. Its roots go down
to the unacknowledged fears left in the heart by religions that have
long since died out in the mind of men. That is