Delsarte System of Oratory

by Delaumosne

Some time later, I again saw my worthy cousin, the innocent cause of all my joys. He was a medical student, and came to propose a visit to the dissecting-room. I did not hesitate to accept; the proposal harmonized with my desire.

I did not go, as so many go to the morgue, merely to see dead bodies. No; the curiosity that impelled me, and the avidity with which I pursued the object of my study, was not to be so easily satisfied.

Dead bodies only attracted me when they were--if not dissected--at least flayed. Children break their dolls to see what there is inside; so I, too, wanted to see what there was in a corpse. It seemed to me that under the mutilations which the scalpel had inflicted on the body, I should find the answer to more than one enigma--might solve some of the secrets of life.

The prospect of this visit had the charm of a pleasure party to me. I made it a holiday and awaited the hour with impatience.

But, on arriving, when I found myself in that place chill and gloomy as the tomb; when I felt choked by the mephitic gases that arose from this seat of infection; when I found myself in the presence of a heap of corpses mutilated by the scalpel, disfigured by putrefaction and partially devoured by rats and worms; when, beneath tables laden with these horrible remains, I saw mean tubs filled with human entrails mingled with limbs and heads severed from their trunks; when I felt fragments of flesh reduced to the state of filthy mud, clinging to my feet, my heart throbbed violently, and I was overcome by an indescribable sense of repulsion.

"What," I said to myself, "those shapeless and putrifying masses have lived! They have thought, they have loved! And, who would believe it from the horror and disgust that they inspire, they have been loved, cherished, perhaps adored! Ah! if, as some think, the soul is not immortal, if so many aspirations, so many schemes, so many hopes are to end here--what is man?"

But yet more lamentable food for thought was reserved for me: the spectacle of a ruin yet more profound than those which my eyes could scarce endure, was to appear before me in all its hideousness.

In fact, there reigns in these gloomy halls where no tear has ever fallen, no prayer has ever been heard and no ray of hope has ever pierced--there reigns something yet colder than death, something more unwholesome, more nauseous, more deleterious than the putrid miasmas that infect the air, something more sad to see than the nameless fragments of extinct life, something more loathsome than those filthy and disgusting remnants, something more repulsive than those noses eaten by worms and those empty eyeballs devoured by rats. I mean the cynicism of the dwellers in that place; I mean their insensibility, their indifference and calm heedlessness in the presence of such grave subjects for thought. I mean that lack of perception, that spirit of negation and revolt of which those wretched men make a boast and which they obstinately oppose to all religious sentiment, all principle of tradition or revealed authority. I mean the atheism and ceaseless mockery with which they invariably meet any generous impulse aroused in an honest soul by a healthy faith.

This struck me even more sensibly than the spectacle of death and dissolution which I have striven to describe. Thus the apparently living men who haunt this spot are more truly dead than the corpses upon which they exercise their pretended science. They seemed to me ruins far more terrible than those of the body, ruins which repelled all hope, being born of doubt and leading to negation.

If the mutilated and half-devoured bodies that lay before me, filled me with horror and disgust, they, at least, left within me a faint lingering hope surviving death; but the state of blindness of those souls who have lost consciousness of their being and even the feeling of their existence, the shadowy abyss into which they allow themselves complaisantly to glide, the nullity which they adorn with the title of science,--all this filled me with fright, for I felt the doubt and despair into which contact with it would inevitably have plunged me, if, by a special favor, the tone and mimetics, alike self-sufficient and mocking, of these free-thinkers, as they are now styled, had not, from the first, inspired me with aversion for them and a salutary hatred of their doctrine.