Victor Hugo's address at the tomb of a young woman.

Although this touching funeral oration has been published by various newspapers, it likewise finds a place in this Review, by reason of the nature of the thoughts it contains, whose import all will be able to understand. The newspaper from which we take it reports the funeral ceremony in the following terms:

“A mournful ceremony gathered, last Thursday, a sorrowfully moved crowd at the cemetery of the dissenters, in Guernsey. They were interring a young woman, whom death had come to surprise amid the joys of the family, and whose sister had married a few days before. She was a happy maiden, to whom one of the great poet's sons, Mr. François Hugo, had dedicated the fourteenth volume of his translation of Shakespeare; she died on the eve of that volume's release.

“As we have just said, the attendance was numerous at this funeral, numerous and sympathetic, and it was with keen emotion, with the tears that friendship shed, that it heard the words of farewell, pronounced over that tomb so prematurely opened, by the illustrious exile of Guernsey, by Victor Hugo himself.

“Here is the address pronounced by the poet:

“Within a few weeks we have busied ourselves with two sisters: we married one and we buried the other. Such is the perpetual tremor of life. Let us bow, my brothers, before stern destiny.

“Let us bow with hope. Our eyes were not made to weep, but to see; our heart was not made to suffer, but to believe. Faith in another existence is born of the faculty of loving. Let us not forget it: in this life, restless and soothed by love, it is the heart that believes. The son counts on finding his father again; the mother does not consent to lose her child forever. This refusal of nothingness is the greatness of man.

“The heart cannot err. The flesh is a dream; it dissipates. If this disappearance were the end of man, it would strip our existence of all sanction. We are not content with this smoke that is matter; we need a certainty. Whoever loves knows and feels that none of man's supports is on Earth. To love is to live beyond life. Without this faith, no perfect gift of the heart would be possible; to love, which is man's object, would be his torment. Paradise would be hell. No! let us say it aloud, the loving creature requires the immortal creature. The heart needs the soul.

“There is a heart in this bier, and that heart is alive. At this moment it hears my words.

“Emily de Putron was the gentle pride of a respectable and patriarchal family. Her friends and kin took her grace for their delight and her smile for their festival. She was like a flower of joy blossoming in the house. From the cradle she was surrounded by every tenderness; she grew up happy and, receiving happiness, she gave happiness; loved, she loved. She has just departed.

“Where has she gone? Into the shadow? No.

“It is we who are in the shadow. She is in the dawn.

“She is in glory, in truth, in reality, in reward. These young women who have died, who did no evil in life, are welcomed from the tomb, and their head rises gently out of the grave, toward a mysterious crown. Emily de Putron went to seek in heaven the supreme serenity, the complement of innocent existences. She has gone: youth, into eternity; beauty, into the ideal; hope, into certainty; love, into the infinite; the pearl, into the ocean; the Spirit, into God.

“Go, soul!

“The marvel of this great celestial departure, which they call death, is that those who depart do not go away. They are in a world of brightness, but they attend, as tenderly moved witnesses, upon our world of darkness. They are on high, and very near. Oh, whoever you may be, who have seen a loved one disappear into the tomb, do not believe yourselves abandoned by them. They are always there. They are at your side more than ever. The beauty of death is presence. Inexpressible presence of the loved souls, smiling upon our tear-filled eyes. The mourned being has disappeared, but has not departed. We no longer perceive their gentle face… The dead are the invisible, but they are not the absent. “Let us render justice to death. Let us not be ungrateful toward it. It is not, as is said, an annihilation, a snare. It is an error to believe that all is lost in the obscurity of this open pit. Here all reappears. The tomb is a place of restitution. Here the soul takes up the infinite again; here it reacquires its fullness; here it enters into possession of its mysterious nature; it frees itself from the body, frees itself from need, frees itself from the burden, frees itself from fatality. Death is the greatest of liberties. It is, too, the greatest of advances. Death is the ascension of all that has lived to the supreme degree. A fascinating and sacred ascension. Each one receives his increase. All is transfigured in the light and by the light. He who on Earth was only honest becomes beautiful; he who was only beautiful becomes sublime; he who was only sublime becomes good. “And now, I who speak, why am I here? what is it that I bring to this pit? by what right do I come to address the word to death? Who am I? Nothing. I am mistaken, I am something. I am a proscribed man. Exiled by force yesterday, voluntary exile today. A proscribed man is a vanquished man, a slandered man, a persecuted man, one wounded by destiny, one disinherited of his homeland. A proscribed man is an innocent under the weight of a curse. His blessing must be good. I bless this tomb.

“I bless the noble and gracious being who is in this pit. In the desert one finds oases; in exile one finds souls. Emily de Putron was one of those charming souls one finds. I come to pay her the debt of a consoled exile. I bless her in the depth of the shadow. In the name of the afflictions over which she gently shone, in the name of the trials of destiny, ended for her, continued for us; in the name of all that she once hoped for and of all that she obtains today, in the name of all that she loved, I bless this death, I bless her in her greatness, in her youth, in her tenderness, in her life and in her death; I bless her in her white sepulchral robe, in her mission that leaves us desolate, in her coffin, which her mother filled with flowers and which God will fill with stars!” To these remarkable words absolutely nothing is lacking but the word Spiritism. They express not merely a vague belief in the soul and in its survival; still less the cold nothingness, succeeding the activity of life, burying forever beneath its mantle of ice the Spirit, the grace, the beauty, the qualities of the heart; nor is it the soul engulfed in this ocean of the infinite, which is called the universal whole; it is indeed the real, individual being, present in our midst, smiling upon those dear to it, seeing them, listening to them, speaking to them through thought. What is more beautiful, more true, than these words: “To love is to live beyond life. Without this faith, no perfect gift of the heart would be possible; to love, which is man's object, would be his torment. Paradise would be hell. No! let us say it aloud, the loving creature requires the immortal creature. The heart needs the soul.” What juster idea of death than this: “The marvel of this great celestial departure, which they call death, is that those who depart do not go away. They are in a world of brightness, but they attend, as tenderly moved witnesses, upon our world of darkness… They are on high, and very near. Oh, whoever you may be, who have seen a loved one disappear into the tomb, do not believe yourselves abandoned by them. They are always there. They are at your side more than ever. It is an error to believe that all is lost in the obscurity of this open pit. Here all reappears. The tomb is a place of restitution. Here the soul takes up the infinite again; here it reacquires its fullness.” Is this not exactly what Spiritism teaches? But to those who might judge themselves the victims of an illusion, it comes to ally to the theory the sanction of the material fact, through the communication of those who have departed with those who remain. What, then, is so unreasonable in believing that these same beings, who are at our side with an ethereal body, can enter into relation with us?

O you, skeptics, who laugh at our beliefs, laugh, then, at these words of the poet-philosopher, whose lofty intelligence you acknowledge! Will you say that he is one who hallucinates? that he is mad when he believes in the manifestation of Spirits? Is he mad who wrote: “Let us have compassion for the punished. Ah! what are we ourselves? what am I, I who speak to you? What are you, you who listen to me? Whence have we come? Is it quite certain that we did nothing before being born? The Earth does not fail to resemble a dungeon. Who knows whether man is not a recidivist of divine justice? Look at life closely; it is made in such a way that one feels punishment everywhere.” (Les Misérables, 7th volume, book VII, chapter 1). – Is this not the pre-existence of the soul, reincarnation on Earth; the Earth a world of expiation? (See the Imitation of the Gospel, numbers 27, 46, 47). You who deny the future, what a strange satisfaction is yours, to take pleasure in the thought of the annihilation of your being, of those whom you have loved! Oh! you have reason to fear death, since, for you, it is the end of all your hopes.

The above address having been read at the Society of Paris, in the session of January 27, 1865, the Spirit of the young Emily de Putron, who, surely, was listening to it and sharing in the emotion of those present, manifested spontaneously through Mrs. Costel and dictated the following words:

“The poet's words ran like a sonorous breath over this assembly; they made your Spirits quiver; they evoked my soul, which still floats uncertain in the infinite ether!

“O poet, revealer of life, well do you know death, for you crown not with cypresses those whom you mourn, but bind to their brows the frail violets of hope! I passed swift and light, barely brushing the moving joys of life; at the close of day I was carried off upon the trembling ray that was dying in the bosom of the waves.

“O my mother, my sister, my friends, great poet! weep no more; remain attentive! The murmur that grazes your ears is mine; the perfume of the drooping flower is my sigh. I mingle with the great life the better to penetrate your love. We are eternal; that which had no beginning cannot end, and your genius, O poet, like the river that runs to the sea, will fill eternity with the power that is force and love!

Emily.”