"Armand would have been a Christian like his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters; the hand of the clock had but a few hours to travel over in order to reach the same point on its face."
I shall eternally regret that I was not able to see Carrel on his death-bed: I should not have despaired, at the last moment, of making the hand "travel over" the space beyond which it would have stopped at the hour of the Christian.
Armand Carrel was not so irreligious as has been supposed; he had doubts: when from fixed incredulity a man passes to indecision, he is very near to arriving at certainty. A few days before his death, he said:
"I would give the whole of this life to believe in the other."
When reporting the suicide of M. Sautelet[316], he wrote this powerful passage:
"I have been able to carry my life, in thought, to that instant, swift as lightning, in which the sight of objects, the power of movement, speech and perception will escape me and the last forces of my mind will gather to form the one idea, 'I am dying;' but of the minute, the second that will immediately follow I have always had an undefinable dread; my imagination has always refused to guess at any part of it. The depths of hell are a thousand times less terrible to measure than that universal uncertainty:
. . . . . . . To die; to sleep;
To sleep! Perchance to dream[317]!"I have seen in all men, whatever their strength of character or belief, that same inability to go beyond their last earthly impression. There we lose our heads, as though, on reaching that boundary, we found ourselves suspended over a precipice of ten thousand feet. We drive away that terrifying sight to go to fight a duel, deliver an assault on a redoubt or face a stormy sea; we even seem to sneer at life; we display a bold, contented, serene countenance; but that is because our imagination reveals success rather than death, because our minds are much less exercised upon the dangers than upon the means of escaping them[318]."
Armand Carrel's funeral.
These words are remarkable in the mouth of a man fated to be killed in a duel.
In 1800, when I returned to France, I did not know that a friend was being born to me on the shore where I was landing[319]. In 1836, I saw that friend lowered into the grave without those consolations of religion of which I brought back the memory to my country in the first year of the century.
I followed the coffin from the residence of the deceased to the place of burial; I walked beside M. Carrel's father and gave my arm to M. Arago: M. Arago has measured the Heaven which I have sung. On reaching the gate of the little rural cemetery, the procession stopped; speeches were delivered. The absence of the cross informed me that the emblem of my affliction was to remain enclosed in the depths of my soul.