I insisted on
Darcy accompanying me. The procession left the Rue St. Augustin, and the
hotel was disinfected. This alone cost me a thousand francs. I gave the
sculptor one thousand five hundred, and the doctor two thousand. Then
there were the expenses of the journey with the coffin. I forget the
figure, but I know it was prodigious.
But I was content. For, of course, Camilla was not precisely in that
coffin. Camilla had not been suffering from precisely typhoid fever. In
strict fact, she had never been ill the least bit in the world. In
strict fact, she had been spirited out of the hotel one night, and at
the very moment when her remains were crossing the Channel in charge of
an inconsolable widower, she was in the middle of the Mediterranean on a
steamer. The coffin contained a really wonderful imitation of her
outward form, modelled and coloured by the American sculptor in a
composition consisting largely of wax. The widower's one grief was that
he was forced to separate himself from his life's companion for a period
of, at least, a week.
A pretty enough scheme, wasn't it, Polycarp? We shall shortly bury the
wax effigy in Brompton Cemetery, with the assistance of Hugo's
undertakers, and a parson or so, and grave-diggers, and registrars of
deaths, and so on and so on.
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