ody, an exhumation, a
dead man coming to life. The bust of the reigning king is in his hall;
possibly he keeps the late royal, imperial, and quasi-royal busts
in some cupboard,--a sort of little Pere-Lachaise all ready for
revolutions. In short, he is a public man, an excellent man, good
husband and good father,--epitaph apart. But so many diverse sentiments
have passed before him on biers; he has seen so many tears, true and
false; he has beheld sorrow under so many aspects and on so many faces;
he has heard such endless thousands of eternal woes,--that to him sorrow
has come to be nothing more than a stone an inch thick, four feet long,
and twenty-four inches wide. As for regrets, they are the annoyances of
his office; he neither breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off
the rain of an inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other
feelings; he will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the
"Auberge des Adrets," the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered
by Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize
death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he _is_ sublime through
every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.

When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.

"I told you," he was saying, "to water the flowers from the rue Massena
to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d'Angely. You paid no attention
to me! _Sac-a-papier_! suppose the relations should take it into their
heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what would they
say to me? They'd shriek as if they were burned; they'd say horrid
things of us, and calumniate us--"

"Monsieur," said Jacquet, "we want to know where Madame Jules is
buried."

"Madame Jules _who_?" he asked. "We've had three Madame Jules within the
last week. Ah," he said, interrupting himself, "here comes the funeral
of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that! He has soon
followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin to go, rattle
down like a wager. Lots of bad blood in Parisians."

"Monsieur," said Jacquet, touching him on the arm, "the person I spoke
of is Madame Jules Desmarets, the wife of the broker of that name."

"Ah, I know!" he replied, looking at Jacquet. "Wasn't it a funeral with
thirteen mourning coaches, an