“HUMAN DOCUMENTS.”
Facing this pastel, in an opposite corner of the room, another little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the giant who shook the earth....
How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions. What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen into the dead past!...—A fragment from Loti’s “Book of Pity and of Death.”