If I mention my funeral oration, it is because I believe it is time for you to compose it. I have been seriously ill for a long time, and especially for the last two weeks. I have attacks of dizziness, spasms of pain, and frightful headaches. Something terrible must have happened to my brain, and I fancy that before long I may become, as Homer says, a companion of the shadowy Proserpine. I should like to know what you would say then. I should be charmed if you were to grieve for two weeks. Do you think this is too much to ask? I am spending part of the night writing, or else in tearing up what I wrote the night before, consequently I make slow progress. What I am writing interests me, but the question is, Will it interest the public? I consider the ancients far more interesting than ourselves; they had no such paltry aims, nor were they so engrossed as we are in a multitude of silly trifles. I find that my hero, Julius Caesar, at the age of fifty-three, committed all sorts of follies for the sake of Cleopatra, forgetting all else for her; this is why he came so near drowning, both literally and figuratively. What man of our century, among our statesmen, I mean, who is not completely callous, completely heartless, by the time he aspires to a seat in the Senate? I should like to explain the difference between that age and our own, but how shall I do it? Have you come to a passage in the _Odyssey_ that I consider wonderful? It is where Ulysses is living with Alcinoüs, still unknown, and after dinner a poet comes before him and sings of the war of Troy. The little that I have seen of Greece gives me a clearer understanding of Homer. Everywhere throughout the _Odyssey_ is seen that amazing love cherished by the Greeks for their native land. There is in modern Greek a charming word: it is ξενιτεἱα, an alien. To be in a strange land is for a Greek the greatest of misfortunes, but to die there is the most terrible calamity of which they can conceive. You scoff at my epicureanism. Have you ever tried to imagine the nature of the entrails which the Greek heroes ate with such relish? The modern philosophers still eat them: they are called κονκονρἑτζι, and are simply delicious. There are little wooden skewers made of the fragrant wood of the mastic tree, with something crisp and spicy around them, which makes one readily understand why the priests used to reserve for themselves this dainty morsel from their victims. Good-bye. If I were to pursue this subject, you would think me more of a glutton than I am. I have no appetite at all, and nothing in the way of little delicacies can any longer tempt me. This means that I am only fit to throw to the crows. There will be deuced weather all through October, and that will finish me! XXII PARIS, _October 24, 1842_.