On the 22nd, I heard of the accident too late; on the morning of the 23rd, I went to Saint-Mandé: M. Carrel's friends were most exceedingly anxious. I wanted to go in, but the surgeon observed that my presence might over-excite the patient and dissipate the faint glimmer of hope that still remained. I went away in consternation. The next day, the 24th, when I was making ready to return to Saint-Mandé, Hyacinthe, whom I had sent ahead of me, came to tell me that the unfortunate young man had expired at half-past five, after suffering atrocious pain: life in all its force had waged a desperate fight with death. The funeral took place on Tuesday the 26th. M. Carrel's father and brother had arrived from Rouen. I found them gathered in a little room with three or four of the most intimate companions of the man whose loss we were mourning. They embraced me and M. Carrel's father said to me: "Armand would have been a Christian like his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters; the hand of the clock had but a few hours to travel over in order to reach the same point on its face." I shall eternally regret that I was not able to see Carrel on his death-bed: I should not have despaired, at the last moment, of making the hand "travel over" the space beyond which it would have stopped at the hour of the Christian. Armand Carrel was not so irreligious as has been supposed; he had doubts: when from fixed incredulity a man passes to indecision, he is very near to arriving at certainty. A few days before his death, he said: "I would give the whole of this life to believe in the other." When reporting the suicide of M. Sautelet[316], he wrote this powerful passage: "I have been able to carry my life, in thought, to that instant, swift as lightning, in which the sight of objects, the power of movement, speech and perception will escape me and the last forces of my mind will gather to form the one idea, 'I am dying;' but of the minute, the second that will immediately follow I have always had an undefinable dread; my imagination has always refused to guess at any part of it. The depths of hell are a thousand times less terrible to measure than that universal uncertainty: . . . . To die; to sleep; To sleep! Perchance to dream[317]! "I have seen in all men, whatever their strength of character or belief, that same inability to go beyond their last earthly impression. There we lose our heads, as though, on reaching that boundary, we found ourselves suspended over a precipice of ten thousand feet. We drive away that terrifying sight to go to fight a duel, deliver an assault on a redoubt or face a stormy sea; we even seem to sneer at life; we display a bold, contented, serene countenance; but that is because our imagination reveals success rather than death, because our minds are much less exercised upon the dangers than upon the means of escaping them[318]."