.. Pauv' petit bonhomme!"
Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness,
when the full, quick flame of your actual life here below is
extinguished, be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest
posterity. May it never quite go out--it need not! May you ever be able
to say of yourself, from generation to generation, "Petit bonhomme vit
encore!" and still keep one finger at least in the pleasant earthly pie!
And, reader, remember so to order your life on earth that the memory of
you (like that of Gatienne, la belle Verriere de Verny le Moustier) may
smell sweet and blossom in the dust--a memory pleasant to recall--to
this end that its recallings and its recallers may be as numerous as
filial love and ancestral pride can make them....
And oh! looking _backward_ (as _we_ did), be tender to the failings of
your forbears, who little guessed when alive that the secrets of their
long buried hearts should one day be revealed to _you_! Their faults are
really your own, like the faults of your innocent, ignorant childhood,
so to say, when you did not know better, as you do now; or will
soon, thanks to
_"Le Chant du Triste Commensal!"_
* * * * *
Wherefore, also, beware and be warned in time, ye tenth transmitters of
a foolish face, ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies, with
hearts and brains to match! Far down the corridors of time shall
club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps, and overtake you at
every turn! Most remorselessly, most vindictively, will you be aroused,
in sleepless hours of unbearable misery (future-waking nightmares), from
your false, uneasy dream of death; to participate in an inheritance of
woe still worse than yours--worse with all the accumulated interest of
long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence, and poisoned by
the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of
your tainted progeny dies out, and finds his true nirvana, and yours, in
the dim, forgetful depths of interstellar space!
* * * * *
And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen
sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I
take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress
you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and
somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during
your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my
best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible
phraseology I could invent.
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