The funeral of Mr. Anselme Prévost-Savary, who died peacefully at his home in Vaucerne, has been postponed by three days at the request of his children, who felt that the eulogy “wasn't holding the audience's attention.”

The ceremony was due to take place on Saturday. It will now take place on Tuesday, in the same church, with the same priest and the same coffin. Only the text has changed.

“The first version began with his childhood on the farm,” explained his eldest daughter, Hersende Prévost-Savary. “The consultant explained that an audience that switches off at the beginning never comes back. Dad deserved better than a room that empties out by the second paragraph.”

The consultant, Mr. Loïc Bonnamy, runs a firm specializing in “emotional hooks.” He had been called in urgently after the family read the eulogy aloud, once, and discovered that no one had cried.

The new version

The rewritten eulogy opens with a direct question to those present, followed by a “high-impact” anecdote about the deceased's youth, then a series of increasingly powerful “milestones,” with his death placed at the end of the journey “for reasons of narrative closure.”

“You no longer tell a life story as a list,” said Mr. Bonnamy. “You tell it as a journey. The deceased is the hero, certainly, but the hero needs an arc. Mr. Prévost-Savary had no arc whatsoever. We found him one.”

The parish priest of Vaucerne, Father Marcien Vaudrey, agreed to let the family read the new text in church, provided that the Mass remained a Mass. He asked that those present not be invited to “react” during the service. The family agreed to postpone the reaction until afterward, over the buffet.

The neighbors

The postponement was discussed at the village bakery. One neighbor felt that a dead man could wait three days, since he had waited his whole life. Another recalled that she herself had given a speech at her niece's wedding “that held everyone's attention perfectly well, without a consultant, and earned me a round of applause.”

Mr. Bonnamy clarified that this sort of testimony was “exactly the kind of unqualified competition” that discouraged professionals in the sector.

The funeral will take place on Tuesday at three in the afternoon. The family has asked residents not to reveal the ending of the eulogy before the ceremony.