Death of Mr. Didier, bookseller-publisher.

— Spiritism has just lost one of its most sincere and devoted adherents in the person of Mr. Didier, who died on Saturday, December 2, 1865. He had been a member of the Spiritist Society of Paris since its founding in 1858 and, as is known, the publisher of our works on the doctrine. On the eve he had attended the session of the Society, and on the following day, at six o'clock in the evening, he died suddenly at a bus station, a few steps from his home, where, fortunately, one of his friends happened to be, who had him carried to the house. His funeral took place on Tuesday, December 5.

The Petit Journal, announcing his death, added: “In these last times, Mr. Didier had published the works of Mr. Allan Kardec and had become, out of a publisher's courtesy, or out of conviction, an adherent of Spiritism.”

We do not think that the most refined courtesy obliges a publisher to espouse the opinions of his clients, nor that he must become a Jew, for example, because he published the works of a rabbi. Such reservations are not worthy of a serious writer. Like any other, Spiritism is a belief that counts more than one bookseller in its ranks. Why would it be stranger for a bookseller to be a Spiritist than a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Saint-Simonian, a Fourierist, or a materialist? When, then, will the freethinking gentlemen admit freedom of conscience for everyone? Could they by chance have the singular pretension of exploiting intolerance for their own benefit, after having fought it in others? Mr. Didier's Spiritist opinions were known and he never made a mystery of them, for he often discussed them with the incredulous. His conviction was profound and of long standing, and not, as the author of the article supposes, a matter of circumstance or a publisher's courtesy. But it is so difficult for these gentlemen, for whom the Spiritist Doctrine lies entirely in the cabinet of the Davenport brothers, to agree that a man of notorious intellectual worth should believe in the Spirits! Nevertheless, they must accustom themselves to this idea, for there are many others that they do not imagine and of which they will not be slow to have the proof. The Grand Journal relates it in these terms:

“Mr. Didier also died, a publisher who published many books, fine and good, in his modest shop on the quai des Grands-Augustins. In these last times Mr. Didier was an adherent — and what is worth still more — a fervent publisher of Spiritist books. The poor man must now know what to think of the doctrines of Mr. Allan Kardec.”

It is sad to see that not even death is respected by the incredulous gentlemen, who pursue with their mockery the most honorable adherents, even beyond the tomb. What, in life, did Mr. Didier think of the doctrine? One fact proved to him the impotence of the attacks of which it is the object: it is that, at the moment of his death, he was printing the 14th edition of The Spirits' Book. What does he think now? It is that there will be great disappointments and more than one defection among his antagonists.

— What we might say on this occasion is summed up in the following address, delivered at the Society of Paris, in its session of December 8.

Gentlemen and dear colleagues, Another of our number has just departed for the celestial homeland! Our colleague, Mr. Didier, has left on earth his mortal remains to clothe himself in the envelope of the Spirits.

Although for a long time and on several occasions his frail health had put his life in danger, and although for us, Spiritists, the idea of death has nothing frightening about it, his end, having come so unexpectedly, on the day immediately following the one on which he attended our session, caused profound emotion among us all.

There is in this death, so to speak sudden as a thunderbolt, a great teaching, or rather, a great warning: it is that our life is held by a thread, which may break when we least expect it, for often death arrives without warning. Thus it warns the survivors to be always prepared to answer the Lord's call and to render account of the use of the life He has given us.

Although, personally, Mr. Didier did not take a very active part in the works of the Society, where he rarely spoke, he was nonetheless one of the most esteemed members, by his seniority as a founding member, by his assiduity and, above all, by his position, his influence and the incontestable services he rendered to the cause of Spiritism, as a propagator and as a publisher. The relations I maintained with him during seven years allowed me to appreciate his uprightness, his loyalty and his special capacities. Without doubt, like each of us, he had his little imperfections, which did not please everyone, sometimes even a certain roughness, with which one had to become familiar, but which took nothing away from his eminent qualities; and the finest praise that can be made of him is to say that, in business, one could deal with him with one's eyes closed. A merchant, he had to regard things commercially, but he did not do so with pettiness and parsimony. He was grand, generous, without avarice in his operations; the lure of gain would not have led him to undertake a publication that did not suit him, however advantageous it might be. In a word, Mr. Didier was not the book dealer, calculating his profit penny by penny, but the intelligent publisher, a fair appraiser; conscientious and prudent, just as was needed to found a serious house like his. His relations with the cultivated world, by which he was loved and esteemed, had developed his ideas and contributed to giving his academic bookshop the grave character that made it a house of the first order, less by the figure of its business than by the specialty of the works it dealt in, and by the commercial consideration which, deservedly, it had enjoyed for long years. As for what concerns me, I congratulate myself on having met him on my path, which, no doubt, I owe to the assistance of the good Spirits; and I say with all sincerity that in him Spiritism loses a support and I a publisher, all the more precious in that, entering perfectly into the spirit of the doctrine, he took true satisfaction in propagating it.

Some people were surprised that I did not speak at his burial. The reasons for my abstention are very simple.

First of all, I will say that the family, not having expressed any wish to me, I did not know whether this would be agreeable to them or not. Spiritism, which reproaches others for imposing themselves, must not incur the same condemnation; it never imposes itself; it waits for people to come to it.

Moreover, I foresaw that the attendance would be numerous and that, among the number, there would be found many persons little sympathetic, or even hostile, to our beliefs. At that solemn moment, besides its having been little fitting to come and publicly clash with contrary convictions, this could furnish our adversaries with a pretext for new aggressions. In this time of controversy, perhaps it would have been an occasion to make the doctrine known; but would it not have been to forget the pious motive that brought us together? To fail in the due respect to the memory of him whom we had just saluted at his departure? Was it over an open grave that it was fitting to counterattack? You will agree, gentlemen, that the moment would have been badly chosen. Spiritism will always gain more by the strict observance of propriety than it will lose by letting slip an occasion to show itself. It knows that it has no need of violence; it aims at the heart: its means of seduction are gentleness, consolation and hope; this is why it finds accomplices even in the enemy ranks. Its moderation and its conciliatory spirit set us off by contrast; let us not lose that precious advantage. Let us seek the afflicted hearts, the souls tormented by doubt: their number is great; there will be our most useful auxiliaries; with them we will make more proselytes than with advertising notices and theatrics. Without doubt I could have limited myself to generalities and made abstraction of Spiritism. But such reticence, on my part, could have been interpreted as fear or a kind of denial of our principles. In such a circumstance I can only speak without circumlocution or keep silent; it was this latter course that I took. Had it been a question of an ordinary speech and on a banal subject, my attitude would have been different. But here what I might have said would have had to have a special character.

I could also have limited myself to the prayer found in The Gospel According to Spiritism, for those who have just left the Earth and which, in such cases, always produces a profound sensation. But here another inconvenience would present itself. The ecclesiastic who accompanied the body to the cemetery remained until the end of the ceremony, contrary to ordinary habits; he listened with redoubled attention to the speech of Mr. Flammarion and perhaps expected, by reason of the well-known opinions of Mr. Didier and of his relations with Spiritism, some more explicit manifestation. After the prayers he had just said and which, in his soul and conscience were sufficient, to come in his presence and say others, which are a whole profession of faith, a summary of principles that are not his, would have seemed a bravado, which is not in the spirit of Spiritism. It is possible that some people would not have been displeased to see the effect of the tacit conflict that might thereby have resulted: it was precisely this that simple propriety bade me avoid. The prayers that each of us said in private, and that we may say among ourselves, will be as profitable to Mr. Didier, if he has need of them, as if they had been made with ostentation. Believe indeed, gentlemen, that I have at heart, as much as anyone, the interests of the doctrine, and that, when I do or do not do a thing, it is with mature reflection and after having weighed the consequences.

Our colleague, Mrs. R…, came on behalf of some of those present to request that I take the floor. People I did not know, she added, had just told her that they had come to the cemetery in the expectation of hearing me. No doubt it was very flattering to me, but, on the part of such people, it was to be roundly mistaken as to my character to think that a stimulant to self-love could induce me to speak in order to satisfy the curiosity of those who had come for some motive other than to render homage to the memory of Mr. Didier. Certainly these people are unaware that, if it repels me to impose myself, neither do I like to display myself. This is what Mrs. R… ought to have answered them, adding that she knew me and esteemed me enough to be certain that the desire to put myself forward would have no influence whatever upon me. In other circumstances, gentlemen, I would have considered it a duty, I would have been happy to render to our colleague a public testimony of affection in the name of the Society, represented at his funeral by a great number of its members. But as feelings reside more in the heart than in demonstration, no doubt each of us had already rendered it to him in his innermost being. At this moment when we are gathered, let us pay him among ourselves the tribute of our grief, of the esteem and the sympathy that he deserves, and let us hope that he will deign to return among us, as in the past, and continue, as a Spirit, the Spiritist task that he had undertaken as a man.