Your loving brother,
Abel de Freydet.
I have opened my letter again to say that the morning papers announce the death of Loisillon. The stroke of fate is always affecting, even when fully expected. What a sad event! What a loss to French literature! And unhappily, dear, it will keep me here still longer. Please pay the labourers. More news soon.
CHAPTER VIII.
DESTINY had willed that Loisillon, fortunate always, should be fortunate in dying at the right moment. A week later, when houses were closed, society broken up, the Chamber and the Institute not sitting, his funeral train would have been composed of Academicians attentive to their tallies, followed only by deputies from the numerous societies of which he was Secretary or President. But business-like to the last and after, he went off to the moment, just before the Grand Prix, choosing a week entirely blank, when, as there was no crime, or duel, or interesting lawsuit, or political event, the sensational obsequies of the Permanent Secretary would be the only pastime of the town.
The funeral mass was to be at twelve o’clock, and long before that hour an immense crowd was gathering round St. Germain des Prés. The traffic was stopped, and no carriages but those of persons invited were allowed to pass within the rails, strictly kept by a line of policemen posted at intervals. Who Loisillon was, what he had done in his seventy years’ sojourn among mankind, what was the meaning of the capital letter embroidered in silver on the funeral drapery, was known to but few in the crowd. The one thing which struck them was the arrangement of the protecting line, and the large space left to the dead, distance, room, and emptiness being the constant symbols of respect and grandeur. It had been understood that there would be a chance of seeing actresses and persons of notoriety, and the cockneys at a distance were putting names to the faces they recognised among the groups conversing in front of the church.
There, under the black-draped porch, was the place for hearing the true funeral oration on Loisillon, quite other than that which was to be delivered presently at Mont Parnasse, and the true article on the man and his work, very different from the notices ready for to-morrow’s newspapers. His work was a ‘Journey in Val d’Andorre,’ and two reports published at the National Press, relating to the time when he was Superintendent at the Beaux-Arts. The man was a sort of shrewd attorney, creeping and cringing, with a permanent bow and an apologetic attitude, which seemed to ask your pardon for his decorations, your pardon for his insignia, your pardon for his place in the Académie—where his experience as a man of business was useful in fusing together a number of different elements, with none of which he could well have been classed—your pardon for the amazing success which had raised so high such a worthless winged grub. It was remembered that at an official dinner he had said of himself complacently, as he bustled round the table with a napkin on his arm, ‘What an excellent servant I should have made!’ And it might have been written on his tomb.
And while they moralised upon the nothingness of his life, his corpse, the remains of nothing, was receiving the honours of death. Carriage after carriage drew up at the church; liveries brown and liveries blue came and disappeared; long-frocked footmen bowed to the pavement with a pompous banging of doors and steps; the groups of journalists respectfully made way, now for the Duchess Padovani, stately and proud, now for Madame Ancelin, blooming in her crape, now for Madame Eviza, whose Jewish eyes shone through her veil with blaze enough to attract a constable—all the ladies of the Académie, assembled in full congregation to practise their worship, not so much by a service to the memory of Loisillon, as by contemplation of their living idols, the ‘deities’ made and fashioned by the cunning of their little hands, the work upon which, as women, they had employed the superabundance of their energy, artfulness, ambition, and pride. Some actresses had come too, on the pretext that the deceased had been the president of some sort of Actors’ Orphanage, but moved in reality by the frantic determination ‘not to be out of it,’ which belongs to their class. Their expressions of woe were such that they might have been taken for near relations. A carriage suddenly drawing up set down a distracted group of black veils, whose sorrow was distressing to witness. The widow, at last? No, it is Marguerite Oger, the great sensational actress, whose appearance excites all round the square a prolonged stir and much pushing about. From the porch a journalist ran forward to meet her, and taking her hands besought her to bear up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I ought to be calm; I will,’ Whereupon, drying her tears and forcing them back with her handkerchief, she entered, or it should rather be said ‘went on,’ into the darkness of the nave, with its background of glimmering tapers, fell down before a desk on the ladies’ side in a prostration of self-abandonment, and rising with a sorrowful air said to another actress at her side, ‘How much did they take at the Vaudeville last night?’ ‘168L. 18s.,’ answered her friend, with the same accent of grief.