iversal soul, of whose echoes this box was its
cross-roads. There's a solid idea!... Perhaps I have twenty or thirty
years to live, and I shall pass away like the others. Like the others?
O Totality, the misery of being there no longer! Ah! I would like to
set out to-morrow and search all through the world for the most
adamantine processes of embalming. They, too, were the little people
of History, learning to read, trimming their nails, lighting the dirty
lamp every evening, in love, gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments,
handshakes, and kisses, living on bell-town gossip, saying, 'What sort
of weather shall we have to-morrow? Winter has really come.... We have
had no plums this year.' Ah! Everything is good, if it would not come
to an end. And thou, Silence, pardon the earth; the little madcap
hardly knows what she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up
before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a piteous _idem_ in the
column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the
column of negligible quantities.... To die! Evidently, one does
without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no
consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep,
into swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to be here no
more, to be ours no more! Not even to be able, any more, to press
against one's human heart, some idle afternoon, the ancient sadness
contained in one little chord on the piano!"

And this "secular sadness" pursues the heartless Hamlet to the
cemetery; he returns after dark in company with the buxom actress
Kate. They have eloped.

But the fatal irresolution again overtakes him. He would see Ophelia's
tomb for the last time, and as he attempts to decipher its
inscription, Laertes--idiot d'humanite, the average sensible
man--approaches and the pair hold converse. It is a revelation of the
face of foolishness. Laertes reproaches Hamlet. He has by his trifling
with Ophelia caused her death. Laertes calls him a poor demented one,
exclaims over his lack of moral sense, and winds up by bidding the
crazy Prince leave the cemetery. Quand on finit par folie, c'est qu'on
a commence par le cabotinage. (Which is a consoling axiom for an
actor.) Hamlet with his naive irony calmly inquires:

"And thy sister!" This is too much for the distracted brother, who
poignards the Prince. Hamlet expires with Nero's cry on his lips:

"Ah! Ah! _Qualis ... artifex ... pereo!_" And, as