which will have to be examined. The interests of the city of Paris might
suffer. Therefore if the matter depended on me, which it does not, I
could not decide _hic et nunc_; I should require a report."

A _report_ is to the present system of administration what limbo
or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for
"reports"; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that
bureaucratic absurdity. He knew that since the invasion into public
business of the _Report_ (an administrative revolution consummated
in 1804) there was never known a single minister who would take upon
himself to have an opinion or to decide the slightest matter, unless
that opinion or matter had been winnowed, sifted, and plucked to bits
by the paper-spoilers, quill-drivers, and splendid intellects of his
particular bureau. Jacquet--he was one of those who are worthy of
Plutarch as biographer--saw that he had made a mistake in his management
of the affair, and had, in fact, rendered it impossible by trying to
proceed legally. The thing he should have done was to have taken Madame
Jules to one of Desmaret's estates in the country; and there, under
the good-natured authority of some village mayor to have gratified the
sorrowful longing of his friend. Law, constitutional and administrative,
begets nothing; it is a barren monster for peoples, for kings, and for
private interests. But the peoples decipher no principles but those that
are writ in blood, and the evils of legality will always be pacific; it
flattens a nation down, that is all. Jacquet, a man of modern liberty,
returned home reflecting on the benefits of arbitrary power.

When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to deceive
him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave his bed.
The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial dinner that
same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing to burn his
wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris took up the
subject, and talked for a while of the burials of antiquity. Ancient
things were just then becoming a fashion, and some persons declared that
it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for distinguished persons, the
funeral pyre. This opinion had its defenders and its detractors. Some
said that there were too many such personages, and the price of wood
would be enormously increased by such a custom; moreover, it would
be absurd to see our ancestors in the