all those bodies destined for the fosse commune whose owners had not
expressed, during their lifetime, a contrary desire. Under the
Consulate, Madame Geneste, wife of the citizen Pierre-Francois Lacheze,
charge d'affaires of the French Republic at Venice, obtained from the
prefet Frochot an authorization to cause the body of her deceased son
to be burned. The prefet invoked, in support of his decision, this
consideration, 'that the last cares to be rendered to mortal remains
constitute a religious act of which public authority cannot prescribe
the methods without violating the principle of liberty of opinions.'
Madame Dupuis-Geneste, however, did not make use of this authorization."

In 1882, M. Casimir-Perier, then minister, proposed a law granting to
every person who had attained his majority and to every minor who had
been relieved from guardianship, the power to regulate all the details
of his own funeral at his own discretion. The _Societe pour la
Propagation de l'Incineration_, which now includes six hundred members,
had been founded two years before by M. Koechlin-Schwartz and M.
Georges-Salomon, and this society caused to be erected, in
Pere-Lachaise, in 1887, on the plans of the architect Formige, a
building destined for the cremation of dead bodies,--this process, it
was declared by the _Conseil d'Hygiene et de Salubrite de la Seine_, on
the proposal of Doctor Bourneville, could be applied to the disposal of
subjects from the dissecting-tables without any menace to the public
health, provided that it was effected in suitable furnaces and without
emitting any odor. M. Casimir-Perier's proposal was finally recognized
by the Chamber and the Senate in 1886 and 1887, and this legal sanction
decided the question practically in favor of the Cremation Society and
of the Conseil Municipal of Paris, which had long been in favor of the
optional incineration of the dead.

The first apparatus, a reverberatory furnace burning wood, was found to
be entirely insufficient, and was replaced by a chamber of combustion
filled with incandescent gas, much more elaborate in construction. A
special apparatus, called a _Gazogene_, evolves carbon protoxide,
which, set on fire by peculiar burners, produces a temperature of eight
hundred degrees Centigrade in the chamber of combustion. The entire
arrangement at Pere-Lachaise is some nine metres in height by five and a
half in width, the actual furnace is below the chamber of combustion