Discourse pronounced at the tomb,

Gentlemen, In the name of the Spiritist Society of Paris, of which I have the honor to be Vice-President, I come to express its sorrow for the cruel loss it has just suffered, in the person of its venerated master, Mr. Allan Kardec, who died suddenly the day before yesterday, Wednesday, in the offices of the Review.

To you, gentlemen, who every Friday gathered in the bosom of the Society, I need not recall that countenance at once benevolent and austere, that perfect tact, that justness of appreciation, that superior and incomparable logic which seemed to us inspired.

To you, who on every day of the week shared in the master's labors, I shall not retrace his continual toils, his correspondence with the four parts of the world, which sent him serious documents, soon classified in his memory and preciously gathered to be submitted to the crucible of his lofty reason, and to form, after a scrupulous labor of elaboration, the elements of those precious works that you all know. Ah! if, like us, it had been given to you to see this mass of materials accumulated in the study of that indefatigable thinker; if, with us, you had penetrated into the sanctuary of his meditations, you would see those manuscripts, some almost finished, others in the course of execution, others, in short, barely sketched, scattered here and there, and which seem to say: Where, then, is our master, who rose so early to work? Ah! more than ever, you too would exclaim, with inflections so sorrowful with bitterness that they would be almost impious: Did God need to call away the man, who could still do so much good? the intelligence so full of sap, the beacon, in short, that drew us out of the darkness and made us glimpse that new world, more vast and admirable than the one that immortalized the genius of Christopher Columbus? He had only begun to make the description of that world, whose fluidic and spiritual laws we already sensed beforehand. But, take comfort, gentlemen, by this thought so often demonstrated and recalled by our president: “Nothing is useless in Nature, everything has its reason for being, and what God does is always well done.”

Let us not resemble those unruly children who, not understanding the decisions of their parents, allow themselves to criticize them and at times even to censure them.

Yes, gentlemen, of this I have the most profound conviction and I express it to you openly: the departure of our dear and venerated master was necessary!

Moreover, would we not be ungrateful and selfish if, thinking only of the good he did us, we forgot the right he had acquired, of going to rest a little in the celestial homeland, where so many friends, so many souls of the elect awaited him and came to receive him, after an absence, which to them too seemed quite long?

Oh! yes, there is joy, there is great festivity on High, and that festivity, that joy, is equaled only by the sadness and the mourning caused by his departure among us, poor exiles, whose time has not yet come! Yes, the master had accomplished his mission! It falls to us to continue his work, with the help of the documents that he left us, and of those, still more precious, that the future holds in store for us. The task will be easy, rest assured, if each one of us dares to assert himself courageously; if each one of us has understood that the light he received must be propagated and communicated to his brothers; if each one of us, in short, has the memory of the heart for our lamented president and knows how to understand the plan of organization that bore the final seal of his work. We shall continue, then, your work, dear master, under your beneficent and inspiring effluvium. Receive here our formal promise. It is the best sign of affection that we can give you.

In the name of the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies, we do not say to you farewell, but until later, until soon!