From one dead person to another…
Translated from French.
From one dead person to another… ⚰️🪦👻
I’m continuing to read “Fantômes et vivants”, the first volume of his memoirs, published by Léon Daudet in 1914, on the eve of the war. 💥💥💥
In Chapter III, he recounts the death of Victor Hugo on 22 May 1885, and the flurry of activity around the deathbed. The extract reminded me of Aunt Léonie’s death 🛌 in the Search; death being one of those occasions during which everyone puts on a mask 🎭, which does not stay in place for very long:
“For about an hour, these disciples remained prostrate and silent. The very next hour, they began to chatter. Indeed, when one is not praying, when one thinks that everything ends with the last breath and the final beat of the heart, it is difficult to sit idly by in silence in the face of such an event. Death without the Church is devoid of grandeur. It seems a bit like an administrative formality, a physiological arithmetic operation, a carnal subtraction: So-and-so was there. He is no longer there. That’s one less. Whose turn is it next?” ⏳⌛️
The images above 📷🎞️ show funeral portraits of Victor Hugo (aged 83) in the spring of 1885 and of Marcel Proust (aged 51) in the autumn of 1922.
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