“This place could use a new furnace.” Andre said it with conviction. It was an old and tired joke, but the wisp of a smile crossed Maintenon’s calm visage. “Sure beats the old days, though.” “Hmn.” Maintenon was preoccupied with Rene’s last words, what a loaded expression, but it might be true—he might never see the fellow again, whether he lived or died almost didn’t enter into the question. The same could be said for anybody. “Imagine all the crowds, pretending to be looking for a lost loved one.” Scholarly papers had been written on the morbidity of the old city morgue. “What were they after? Some kind of sick emotional thrill?” Something to spark their jaded, bourgeois sensibilities, raw sentimentalism, canned and boxed and packaged for easy consumption. Gilles sighed at the thought of their obsession with death above all else. It fascinated them. A funeral was as good as a wedding, in some ways. It bought people together. It was all about modern communications affecting a kind of mass consciousness exhibited by large numbers of people acting on impulse.
