The author has not confined himself to these purely material details. He has examined the funeral papyri which, more or less valuable, are found with each mummy; he has carefully studied the allegorical signs which represent the judgment of the soul, the good and evil deeds of which are weighed before Osiris and the forty-two judges, and thus he has mastered the mysterious beliefs of the Egyptians on the question of the future life. The soul, whether it was conducted to Amenti or driven into the infernal regions--that is, towards the West--by the dog-headed monkeys, who appear to have been a sort of daemons charged with the carrying out of sentences,--the soul was, nevertheless, not freed from all connection with the body; its relative immortality depended in some sort upon the integrity of the latter; the alteration, the deprivation of one of the limbs was supposed to be felt by the soul, the form of whose impalpable spectre would have been mutilated and could not have traversed, wanting a leg or an arm, the cycle of migrations or metempsychoses. Hence the religious care taken of the human remains, the infallible methods and the minute precautions of the embalmers, the perfect solidity and the secret location of the tombs, of which the priests alone possessed the plan, the constant thought of eternity in death which characterised in so striking a manner the ancient Egyptians and makes them a nation apart, incomprehensible to modern nations, which are generally so eager to give back to the earth and to cause to disappear the generations which have preceded them. During his long and intimate acquaintance with Egypt, M. Ernest Feydeau, who is not only an archaeologist but also a poet, after he had sounded the mysteries of the old kingdom of the Pharaohs, became passionately attached to that art which the Greek ideal--which nevertheless is indebted to it for more than one lesson--has caused us to despise too much. He has understood, both as a painter and a sculptor, a beauty which is so different from our own standard and which is yet so real.