on. Their dead one rests in peace.

The following morning at daybreak there was an indescribable commotion
in Etretat. Some insisted that they had burned a man alive, others that
they were trying to hide a crime, some that the mayor would be put
in jail, others that the Indian prince had succumbed to an attack of
cholera.

The men were amazed, the women indignant. A crowd of people spent the
day on the site of the funeral pile, looking for fragments of bone in
the shingle that was still warm. They found enough bones to reconstruct
ten skeletons, for the farmers on shore frequently throw their dead
sheep into the sea. The finders carefully placed these various fragments
in their pocketbooks. But not one of them possesses a true particle of
the Indian prince.

That very night a deputy sent by the government came to hold an inquest.
He, however, formed an estimate of this singular case like a man of
intelligence and good sense. But what should he say in his report?

The East Indians declared that if they had been prevented in France from
cremating their dead they would have taken him to a freer country where
they could have carried out their customs.

Thus, I have seen a man cremated on a funeral pile, and it has given me
a wish to disappear in the same manner.

In this way everything ends at once. Man expedites the slow work of
nature, instead of delaying it by the hideous coffin in which one
decomposes for months. The flesh is dead, the spirit has fled. Fire
which purifies disperses in a few hours all that was a human being; it
casts it to the winds, converting it into air and ashes, and not into
ignominious corruption.

This is clean and hygienic. Putrefaction beneath the ground in a closed
box where the body becomes like pap, a blackened, stinking pap, has
about it something repugnant and disgusting. The sight of the coffin as
it descends into this muddy hole wrings one's heart with anguish. But
the funeral pyre which flames up beneath the sky has about it something
grand, beautiful and solemn.

MISTI

I was very much interested at that time in a droll little woman. She
was married, of course, as I have a horror of unmarried flirts. What
enjoyment is there in making love to a woman who belongs to nobody
and yet belongs to any one? And, besides, morality aside, I do not
understand love as a trade. That disgusts me somewhat.

The especial attraction in a married woman to a bachelor is that she
gives hi