Voltaire and Rousseau.
We have dug up Richelieu, opened Bossuet’s tomb, disturbed the great Napoleon’s coffin. A few years ago I saw the sarcophagi of Voltaire and Rousseau opened at the Panthéon. I saw the skull of the author of “Candide” passed from hand to hand; I saw men’s finger-nails scratch away its reddish coating (probably due, as Monsieur Berthelot told us, to the sublimate that had preserved the corpse).
In his leaden coffin, with arms crossed upon his breast, I saw the man who had written “The Social Contract”; I saw the onlookers—indifferent or curious—poke their fingers into the empty sockets now bereft of those eyes that had once gazed upon Madame de Warrens, or try to snatch from a jaw-bone—“as a souvenir, monsieur!”—one of those teeth that had touched cherries picked In Madame Gallet’s company.
I was present at that Dance of Death which men call “an historical exhumation.” And the inevitable photographer was there at the Panthéon, just as at Aix-la-Chapelle. Great men’s bones are hustled about, their skulls are pried into and weighed, as if, forsooth, some sparkle of genius could be got out of them!