I was talking to my friend P. V. recently about biopics. We tossed around different names of historical and musical and political and otherwise-notable figures about whom movies have not, to our combined knowledge, been produced. We settled on a few top choices.

Mrs. Margaret Thompson was not one of the potential movie-protagonists. But, rereading a passage from The Gentle Art of Smoking, a short, bizarre book about tobacco (mostly pipe-making and the making of “flake,” the baklava-esque tobacco preferred by pipe-enthusiasts in the mid-1950s), I was struck by how odd a scene Thompson’s funerary march would make if filmed. It’s right out of Fellini, or maybe Kaufman. Or maybe Sophie Barthes, whose Cold Souls juggles just the right mix of wtf-is-this-really-the-real-Paul-Giamatti?, gallows humor, and monkey’s-paw super science.

Presently presents the author, the case of the snorting ridiculousness of Mrs. Thompson:

The most notable female snuff taker of this period, as Mr. H. V. Morton pointed out in The Ghosts of London, was Mrs. Margaret Thompson, who died in 1776 and whose devotion to snuff is made clear in her will. She directed that the bottom of her coffin be filled with unwashed handkerchiefs and a sufficient quantity of the best Scotch snuff to cover her body. The six greatest snuff takers in the parish were to act as bearers and, instead of black, they were to wear snuff-colored beaver hats. Snuff was to be strewn before the funeral procession and carried in boxes by her pallbearers for their refreshment as they went along.

—The Gentle Art of Smoking, Alfred H. Dunhill, 1954.