to us an image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious
object of a solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us
the impression of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt
as a model the immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But
complete automatism is only reached in the official, for instance,
who performs his duty like a mere machine, or again in the
unconsciousness that marks an administrative regulation working with
inexorable fatality, and setting itself up for a law of nature.
Quite by chance, when reading the newspaper, I came across a
specimen of the comic of this type. Twenty years ago, a large
steamer was wrecked off the coast at Dieppe. With considerable
difficulty some of the passengers were rescued in a boat. A few
custom-house officers, who had courageously rushed to their
assistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare."
We find something similar, though the idea is a more subtle one, in
the remark of an M.P. when questioning the Home Secretary on the
morrow of a terrible murder which took place in a railway carriage:
"The assassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the
wrong side of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules."

A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic
regulation of society, such, then, are the two types of laughable
effects at which we have arrived. It remains for us, in conclusion,
to combine them and see what the result will be.

The result of the combination will evidently be a human regulation
of affairs usurping the place of the laws of nature. We may call to
mind the answer Sganarelle gave Geronte when the latter remarked
that the heart was on the left side and the liver on the right:
"Yes, it was so formerly, but we have altered all that; now, we