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Updated: June 9, 2025
In his own home, Jacquet was an easy-going king, an umbrella-man, as they say, who hired a carriage for his wife which he never entered himself.
"Monsieur," said Jacquet, "we want to know where Madame Jules is buried." "Madame Jules who?" he asked. "We've had three Madame Jules within the last week. Ah," he said, interrupting himself, "here comes the funeral of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that! He has soon followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin to go, rattle down like a wager.
But having had the ill fortune to borrow of Maître Jacquet Coquedouille the sum of six livres ten sous, and having paid him back at divers terms eighty livres two sous, he had found himself at the last to owe yet six livres two sous to the account of his creditor, which account was approved correct by the judges, for Jacquet Coquedouille was a sound arithmetician.
After the second day Jacquet was obliged to tell his friend that he must renounce his desire, because, in a city where the number of tears shed on black draperies is tariffed, where the laws recognize seven classes of funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is sold at its weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra voices in the Dies irae, all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed by the authorities for sorrow is useless and impossible.
We will go together; I'll wait for you, if you like, in the street. You may run some danger, and you ought to have near you some devoted person who'll understand a mere sign, and whom you can safely trust. Count on me." "Even to help me in killing some one?" "The deuce! the deuce!" said Jacquet, repeating, as it were, the same musical note. "I have two children and a wife."
"You killed her," thought he. "Why was I distrusted?" seemed the answer of the husband. The scene was one that might have passed between two tigers recognizing the futility of a struggle and, after a moment's hesitation, turning away, without even a roar. "Jacquet," said Jules, "have you attended to everything?"
When the solemn ceremony was over, twelve men came from the six chapels and stood around the coffin to hear the song of hope which the Church intones for the Christian soul before the human form is buried. Then, each man entered alone a mourning-coach; Jacquet and Monsieur Desmarets took the thirteenth; the servants followed on foot.
Therefore if the matter depended on me, which it does not, I could not decide hic et nunc; I should require a report." A report is to the present system of administration what limbo or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for "reports"; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that bureaucratic absurdity.
Happily for Jules, he knew nothing of the conversations, the witty speeches, and arguments which his sorrow had furnished to the tongues of Paris. The prefect of police was indignant that Monsieur Jacquet had appealed to a minister to avoid the wise delays of the commissioners of the public highways; for the exhumation of Madame Jules was a question belonging to that department.
Jacquet, a nobly upright man, a toiler, austere in his morals, had slowly made his way in that particular ministry which develops both honesty and knavery at the same time. A clerk in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, he had charge of the most delicate division of its archives.
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