circumstances by honest folk who, in this nineteenth century,
will take a man's money and undertake to pay him a life annuity
on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for
the term of her natural life! Would they be for resuscitating
their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences
to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and
fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does
humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making
progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men's shoes as a
step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable
professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are
people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over
it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for
their pillow at night. To this class belong bishops' coadjutors,
cardinals' supernumeraries, _tontiniers_, and the like. Add to the
list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed
property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in
cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a
step-mother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to
themselves, "I shall be sure to come in for it in three years'
time, and then----" A murderer is less loathsome to us than a
spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may
be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day,
in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every
moment of his life. Then what must it be to live when every
moment of your life is tainted with murder? And have we not just
admitted that a host of human creatures in our midst are led by
our laws, customs, and usages to dwell without ceasing on a
fellow-creature's death? There are men who put the weight of a
coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere