The heroic dust, as Chateaubriand calls it, of the heart of Duguesclin, stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded up by a glazier to mix his paints. So again we read of the slaughtered hosts during the retreat from Moscow: “Some industrial companies have transported themselves into the desert with their furnaces and their caldrons; the bones have been converted into animal black; whether it come from the dog or from the man, the varnish is equally valuable, and is as brilliant when drawn from obscurity as from glory.” Cornelia Knight mentions a Parmese canon, who one day, while the French were in occupation of Piacenza, found the church in possession of three surgeons, or surgeons’ mates, of that army, “busily skinning” the dead body of a French soldier. “Horrified at the sight, he asked the meaning of this ghastly proceeding, and was told that some scientific men had discovered that the human skin made excellent leather,” and that it had been therefore ordered that all dead bodies should be skinned, for the purpose of providing boots and shoes for the soldiers. Ziska’s skin-deep drum-destiny was at least a seeming nobler, if not essentially a more useful one.
Xenophon makes his pattern-prince desirous of having his body turned to beneficial uses after death, by being incorporated with mother earth; positively enjoining his sons not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but to bury it in the ground as soon as the life was gone out of it. Little would trouble him the anticipated contingency of such a peut-être as Burns surmises, in the case of a recently deceased acquaintance—like Xenophon, a sportsman to the core:—
“There low he lies, in lasting rest;
Perhaps, upon his mould’ring breast
Some spitefu’ moorfowl bigs her nest,
To hatch and breed.”
Cyrus, like the essentially practical statesman in Mrs. Gore’s tale, would presumably have detected no irony in Hamlet’s assignment of purpose to the ashes of imperious Cæsar: “It seemed a relief to his mind that emperors, when turned to clay, could be turned to account.” No more objection to that, than to such a circumstance as “The Traveller” deplores, that
... “in those domes where Cæsar once bore sway,
Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,