"To look as though she's in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!" A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr.
Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his moral homilies.
"Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of virgin wax to the Lord.

The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions.
This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's." The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting in a low voice: _"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non contrisemimi, sicut et caeteri qui spem non habent."_ "Who is taking the part of Florentin ?" inquired Durville of Romilly.
"Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier." Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said: "Dr.Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the soul ?" He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal information.
"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what Cyrano's bird said on this very subject.

One day Cyrano de Bergerac heard two birds conversing in a tree.

One of them said, 'The souls of birds are immortal,' 'There can be no doubt of it,' replied the other.
'But it is inconceivable that beings who possess neither bill nor feathers, who have no wings and walk on two legs, should believe that they, like the birds, have an immortal soul.'" "All the same," said Pradel, "when I hear the organ, I am chock-full of religious ideas." _"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine."_ The celebrated author of _La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812_ appeared in the church, and no sooner had he done so than he was everywhere at one and the same moment--in the nave, under the porch, and in the choir.

Like the _Diable boiteux_ he must, bestriding his crutch, have soared above the heads of the congregation, to pass as he did in the twinkling of an eye from Morlot, the deputy, who, being a freethinker, had remained in the parvis, to Marie-Claire kneeling at the foot of the catafalque.
At one and at the same moment he whispered into the ears of all a few nimble phrases: "Pradel, can you imagine this fellow going and chucking his part, an excellent part, and running off to kill himself?
A pumpkin-headed fool! Blows out his brains just two days before the first night.