ace. Besides, some persons like to be told all, and
wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to know by what
chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin's lamp.

Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was brought
that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was necessary to
employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a man so crushed
that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was also necessary to
coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature of the request,
which was done in these words: "The petitioner respectfully asks for the
incineration of his wife."

When the official charged with making the report to the Councillor of
State and prefect of police read that marginal note, explaining the
object of the petition, and couched, as requested, in the plainest
terms, he said:--

"This is a serious matter! my report cannot be ready under eight days."

Jules, to whom Jacquet was obliged to speak of this delay, comprehended
the words that Ferragus had said in his hearing, "I'll burn Paris!"
Nothing seemed to him now more natural than to annihilate that
receptacle of monstrous things.

"But," he said to Jacquet, "you must go to the minister of the Interior,
and get your minister to speak to him."

Jacquet went to the minister of the Interior, and asked an audience; it
was granted, but the time appointed was two weeks later. Jacquet was a
persistent man. He travelled from bureau to bureau, and finally reached
the private secretary of the minister of the Interior, to whom he had
made the private secretary of his own minister say a word. These high
protectors aiding, he obtained for the morrow a second interview, in
which, being armed with a line from the autocrat of Foreign affairs to
the pacha of the Interior, Jacquet hoped to carry the matter by assault.
He was ready with reasons, and answers to peremptory questions,--in
short, he was armed at all points; but he failed.

"This matter does not concern me," said the minister; "it belongs to the
prefect of police. Besides, there is no law giving a husband any legal
right to the body of his wife, nor to fathers those of their children.
The matter is serious. There are questions of public utility involved