The Messengers of Death

"It was at the time when Emile Pencenat was digging his own burial plot, Sunday after Sunday. He had obtained permission, although there was no precedent for this kind of thing. The town council was not impressed by this whim, but could find nothing that formally forbade it. Moreover, there was a lack of men willing to do the low-paid work of looking after the field of the dead. Finally, to clinch the decision, Emile Pencenat had declared:
'I'll sweep your cemetery myself; I'll throw out the dead boquets; I'll weed the grass around the graves, and I'll even pick up the pots of chrysanthemums blown over by the wind.'
How could they resist the offer of so much free work? They didn't even ask him why he insisted on a separate burial place, when there was a spacious and resoundingly empty family vault, because everyone was only too aware of the reply to that question: it was to avoid sharing eternity with his wife Prudence, with whom he did not get on.
Besides, he didn't like that plot. It looked like a Protestant mausoleum in the middle of the Catholic cemetery. It was sharp-edged, forbidding, and to make matters worse, it had a mean and parsimonious view of eternity that made the afterlife seem quite unattractive. As it happened, Emile Pencenat was fortunate enough to imagine the realm of the departed in a happier light - when one has gloomy thoughts, all the more reason for them to be flowery: if it were possible, his tomb would be a small-scale copy of an eastern potentate's ceremonial tester bed swathed in gold-fringed theatre drapes. The whole thing would be dominated by an opulent canopy and surrounded by a festooned balustrade with columns. . . .
. . . On rainy days he spent his time in his shed sculpting cherubs' heads, with which he hoped to enliven the pink marble columns around his masterpiece. Not that he had reached that point. He didn't know yet where he could get pink marble, nor how he was going to pay for it. But he'd only been thinking about digging his tomb for a few months; in fact it was since his retirement, when he was wondering anxiously what he could do to lessen his boredom. And so he had plenty of time to make enquiries, he thought.
Pierre Magnan