Short Fiction quotes

black and dried, very long and looking as if it were contracted. The muscles, of extraordinary power, were held in place on the back and palm by a strip of parchment-like skin, while the narrow, yellow nails still remained at the tips of the fingers.

The whole hand reeked of crime a mile off.

“Just fancy,” said my friend, “the other day the belongings of an old sorcerer were sold who was very well known all over the countryside.

He was small, alert and wiry.

He had in him something of the rat, the ant and the terrier: that is to say, he was the kind of being which investigates, gnaws, hunts and never tires.

Looking at him one could not understand how all the doctrines which he had studied could ever have found their way into so small a head, but one could imagine, on the other hand, that he himself could have burrowed his way into science and …

“If he had not been the learned Doctor Heraclius,” the Warden of the Faculty of Balançon declared, “he would certainly have made an excellent knife.”

He wore a wig, dressed with care, was never ill, loved animals, did not detest his fellow men and adored roast quails.

As soon as the doctor was up, washed and shaved, and had partaken of a roll and butter dipped in a cup of chocolate flavoured with vanilla, he went down into his garden.

he had studied the sects of India and the religions of the Negroes of Africa; there was no tribe, however insignificant, among the barbarians of the north or the savages of the south whose superstitions he had not sounded.

But alas! alas! the more he used to study, to search, to investigate and meditate, the more undecided he became.

“My friend,” said he to the Warden one evening, “how much happier than we are men like Columbus who launch themselves across the seas in search of a new world! They have only to go straight ahead.

Truly a strange sight for anyone who could have seen into the doctor’s mind at that moment—this monstrous procession of contrasting divinities and disparate beliefs, this fantastic interlacing of doctrines and hypotheses.

His mind was like an arena in which the champions of all the philosophies tilted against each other in a colossal tournament.

He amalgamated, combined, and mixed the old Oriental spiritualism with German materialism, the ethics of the Apostles with those of the Epicureans.

and his good friend the Warden maintained that this philosophic truth, eternally waited, was very like a philosopher’s stone—a stumbling block.

At midnight the Doctor went to bed and his dreams when asleep were the same as those of his waking hours.

One evening when the Dean, the Warden and the Doctor were together in the latter’s vast study, they had a most interesting discussion.

“My friend,” said the Warden, “one ought to be an eclectic and an epicurean. Choose that which is good and reject that which is evil.

Philosophy is a huge garden which extends all over the world.

Pluck the dazzling flowers of the East, the pale blossoms of the North, the wild violets and cultivated roses, make a nosegay of them and inhale its perfume.

For in your bouquet you would not be able to prevent certain smells from destroying each other; and, in philosophy, certain beliefs from contradicting each other.

The truth is a one whole⁠—and with your eclecticism you will never obtain other than a truth composed of fragments.

I too have been an eclectic, but now I am an absolutist. What I desire is not a chance approximation, but the absolute truth.

“Amen!” said the Warden, “but tomorrow a second man will be enlightened and a third on the day after. Then they will hurl their revelations at each other’s heads.

Luckily, though, revelations are not very dangerous weapons.

”

“I believe in digestion,” replied the Warden solemnly. “

I swallow with indifference every creed, dogma, morality, superstition, hypothesis and illusion, just as at a good dinner I eat with equal pleasure hors d’ouvre, soup, joint, vegetables, sweets and dessert, after which I stretch myself philosophically on my bed, assured that my undisturbed digestion will bring me pleasant sleep during the night and life and health on the following morning.

”

“

Poor Doctor, if the truth appears before him as the woman he loved did, he will be the most deceived man that the world has ever known.

”

Oh, obstinate Warden! Nothing could convince him.

The sun itself might have come in person to burn his beard and his hair and he would have taken it for a candle.

As for Doctor Heraclius Gloss, it need hardly be said that he was radiant, enlightened, transformed. Like Pauline, he kept repeating every other moment:

Doctor Heraclius was very happy during the days following his surprising discovery. He lived in a state of downright jubilation, he was full of the glory of difficulties overcome, of mysteries unveiled, of great hopes realized.

Metempsychosis encompassed him like the sky.

It seemed to him that a curtain had been suddenly torn down and that his eyes had been opened to things hitherto unknown.

And on the table, fresh and plump, held together by a little silver skewer and giving out an appetising smell, were half a dozen quails.

The fight between mind and stomach was terrible, but be it said to Heraclius’ glory, it was short.

The poor man, quite overcome and afraid lest he would not for long be able to resist such fearful temptation, rang for his servant and in a broken voice enjoined her to remove forthwith the abominable dish and to serve henceforth only eggs, milk and …

Without making a sound, the Doctor reached his study door and went in. Now Heraclius was without doubt a courageous man.

He was not afraid of spectres or ghosts; but however fearless a man may be, there exist certain terrors which, like cannon balls, will pierce the most indomitable courage.

The Doctor stood transfixed, livid, horror-stricken, his eyes haggard and his hair on end, his teeth chattering and his whole body quivering from head to foot in a dreadful way, before the incomprensible sight which confronted him.

When talking to him, he looked earnestly at him and explained the points in his arguments which might have been obscure. In fact he surrounded the creature’s entire life with gentle care and delicate attention.

But the monkey accepted it all as calmly as a god receiving the homage of its worshippers.

Heraclius, like all great minds living in solitude, isolated by their sublimity above the common level of foolishness of ordinary people, had up till then felt himself alone.

But the monkey accepted it all as calmly as a god receiving the homage of its worshippers.

Heraclius, like all great minds living in solitude, isolated by their sublimity above the common level of foolishness of ordinary people, had up till then felt himself alone. Alone in his work, alone in his hopes, in his struggles and his failures, alone even in his discovery and his triumph.

He had not yet preached his doctrine to the masses. He had not even been able to convince his most intimate friends, the Warden and the Dean.

Thus his genealogy could challenge that of the most ancient families of the nobility. He looked with supreme contempt on all the great men in the history of the race and their highest achievements seemed as nothing beside his.

He installed himself in sublime isolation among his worlds and his animals: he was metempsychosis itself and his house was its temple.

He had forbidden both his servant and his gardener to kill noxious animals.

Heraclius did not answer—but he was thinking hard. A revolution was taking place in him. There was no possible doubt—victory lay with his rival. But this author—whom at one time he had invoked with all his prayers, raised his indignation now as a false god.

For, as a dethroned god himself, he revolted against divinity.

Before he had come to regard himself as the author of the manuscript, he had longed to meet whoever had written it, but from the day when he began to say: “It was I who wrote this.

“It was I who wrote this. Metempsychosis is I myself,” he could no longer sanction anyone usurping his place.

Like a man who would burn his house down rather than see it occupied by someone else, he was prepared to burn both temple and god, to burn metempsychosis itself even, as soon as a stranger ascended the altar to which he had exalted himself.

And so, after a long silence, he said slowly and solemnly:

“Ah!” said he, “how many recollections I have of the river that flows at our feet! You street-dwellers have no idea what the river really is. But let a fisherman pronounce the word.

To him it means mystery, the unknown, a land of mirage and phantasmagoria, where odd things that have no real existence are seen at night and strange noises are heard; where one trembles without knowing the reason why, as when passing through a cemetery⁠—and indeed the river is a sinister cemetery without graves.

“Land, for a fisherman, has boundaries, but the river, on moonless nights, appears to him unlimited. A sailor doesn’t feel the same way about the sea. The sea is often cruel, but it roars and foams, it gives us fair warning;

“Ah!” said he, “how many recollections I have of the river that flows at our feet!

You street-dwellers have no idea what the river really is.

But let a fisherman pronounce the word. To him it means mystery, the unknown, a land of mirage and phantasmagoria, where odd things that have no real existence are seen at night and strange noises are heard;

“Land, for a fisherman, has boundaries, but the river, on moonless nights, appears to him unlimited. A sailor doesn’t feel the same way about the sea.

The sea is often cruel, but it roars and foams, it gives us fair warning; the river is silent and treacherous.

It flows stealthily, without a murmur, and the eternal gentle motion of the water is more awful to me than the big ocean waves.

A sailor doesn’t feel the same way about the sea. The sea is often cruel, but it roars and foams, it gives us fair warning; the river is silent and treacherous.

It flows stealthily, without a murmur, and the eternal gentle motion of the water is more awful to me than the big ocean waves.

“Dreamers believe that the deep hides immense lands of blue, where the drowned roll around among the big fish, in strange forests or in crystal caves. The river has only black depths, where the dead decay in the slime.

“Dreamers believe that the deep hides immense lands of blue, where the drowned roll around among the big fish, in strange forests or in crystal caves.

The river has only black depths, where the dead decay in the slime.

But it’s beautiful when the sun shines on it, and the waters splash softly on the banks covered with whispering reeds.

“ ‘O flots, que vous savez de lugubres histoires! Flots profonds, redoutés des mères à genoux, Vous vous les racontez en montant les marées, Et c’est ce qui vous fait ces voix désespérées Que vous avez, le soir, quand vous venez vers nous.’

Well, I believe that the stories the slender reeds tell one another in their wee, silvery voices are even more appalling than the ghastly tragedies related by the roaring waves.

“But as you have asked me to relate some of my recollections, I will tell you a strange adventure that happened to me here, about ten years ago.

“I tried to overcome my dread. I determined not to be afraid, but there was something in me besides my will and that something was fainthearted.

I asked myself what there was to fear; my courageous self railed at the other, the timid one; never before had I so fully realised the opposition that exists between the two beings we have in us; the one willing, the other resisting, and each one triumphing in turn.

But this foolish and unaccountable fear was growing worse and worse, and was becoming positive terror. I remained motionless, with open eyes and straining ears, waiting. For what? I scarcely knew, but it must have been for something terrible.

“I tried to overcome my dread.

I determined not to be afraid, but there was something in me besides my will and that something was fainthearted.

I asked myself what there was to fear; my courageous self railed at the other, the timid one; never before had I so fully realised the opposition that exists between the two beings we have in us;

I shouted to it and a voice responded: it was a fisherman. I called to him and told him of my plight. He brought his boat alongside mine and both began tugging at the chain. The anchor still would not yield.

A cold, rainy day was setting in, one of those days that bring disaster and sadness.

I perceived another boat, which we hailed. The owner added his strength to ours, and little by little the anchor gave way. It came up very slowly, laden with considerable weight. Finally a black heap appeared and we dragged it into my boat.

Night was falling, and a brownish mist filled the horizon, and everything retreated into the dark and gloomy distance.

Three tall fir-trees close by seemed to be weeping.

No voice replied, but the air was full of vague moaning. The father listened for a long time, believing that he could hear something, now on his right now on his left, and he plunged wildly into the night, calling incessantly: “Jean! Jean!”

No voice replied, but the air was full of vague moaning. The father listened for a long time, believing that he could hear something, now on his right now on his left, and he plunged wildly into the night, calling incessantly: “Jean! Jean!”

He ran on until daybreak, filling the shadows with his cries, frightening the prowling animals, his heart torn by a terrible anguish, so that at times he thought he was going mad.

His wife remained seated at the door, and wept until morning. Their son was never found.

Being as prudent as he was brave, subtle, inventive, and very resourceful, he was placed in charge of some hundred men, and he organised a service of scouts which saved the army several times during retreats.

Like a tidal wave the invaders poured over the entire frontier, wave after wave of men, leaving behind them the scum of pillage.

General Carrel’s brigade was separated from its division, and had to retreat continuously, taking part in daily engagements, but preserving its ranks almost intact, thanks to the vigilance and speed of Lieutenant Laré, who seemed to be everywhere at once, outwitting the enemy, disappointing their …

The snow, which was still falling, powdered them white in the darkening shadows, and, as it did not melt on their uniforms, they were barely distinguishable in the dark from the general pallor of the landscape.

From time to time they halted, and then not a sound could be heard but that imperceptible rustle of falling snow, a vague and sinister sound, which is felt rather than heard.

An order was given in whispers, and when the march was resumed they had left behind them a sort of white phantom standing in the snow, growing more and more indistinct until finally it disappeared.

Simon was silent, he did not know. The children shrieked, tremendously excited.

These sons of the soil, more animal than human, experienced the cruel craving which makes the fowls of a farmyard destroy one of their own kind as soon as it is wounded.

Simon suddenly spied a little neighbour, the son of a widow, whom he had always seen, as he himself was to be seen, quite alone with his mother.

Frenzy overtook him. There were stones under his feet; he picked them up and with all his strength hurled them at his tormentors. Two or three were struck and ran away yelling, and so formidable did he appear that the rest became panic-stricken.

Cowards, like a jeering crowd in the presence of an exasperated man, they broke up and fled.

Left alone, the little thing without a father set off running toward the fields, for a recollection had been awakened which nerved his soul to a great determination. He made up his mind to drown himself in the river.

“Philip who? Philip what? What on earth is Philip? Where did you pick up your Philip?”

Simon answered nothing; and immovable in faith he defied them with his eye, ready to be martyred rather than fly before them.

The schoolmaster came to his rescue and he returned home to his mother.

She answered him civilly, always sedately, never joking with him, nor permitting him to enter her house. Notwithstanding this, being like all men, a bit of a coxcomb, he imagined that she was often rosier than usual when she chatted with him.

But a fallen reputation is so difficult to recover, and always remains so fragile that, in spite of the shy reserve La Blanchotte maintained, they already gossiped in the neighbourhood.

As for Simon, he loved his new father very much, and walked with him nearly every evening when the day’s work was done. He went regularly to school and mixed in a dignified way with his schoolfellows without ever answering them back.

This forge was entombed in trees. It was very dark there, the red glare of a formidable furnace alone lit up with great flashes five blacksmiths, who hammered upon their anvils with a terrible din.

Standing enveloped in flame, they worked like demons, their eyes fixed on the red-hot iron they were pounding; and their dull ideas rising and falling with their hammers.

Simon entered without being noticed and quietly plucked his friend by the sleeve. Philip turned round. All at once the work came to a standstill and the men looked on very attentively. Then, in the midst of this unaccustomed silence, rose Simon’s piping voice.

“

Is it the girl’s fault if she has fallen? She had been promised marriage, and I know more than one who is much respected today and has sinned every bit as much.

”

Their uneasy and melancholy faces also spoke of domestic troubles, of constant want of money, of former hopes that had been finally disappointed.

They all belonged to that army of poor, threadbare devils who vegetate economically in mean, plastered houses, with a tiny grass border for a garden, in the midst of the district where rubbish is deposited, on the outskirts of Paris.

Near the door a short, fat man, with a puffy face and a big stomach, dressed in black and wearing a decoration in his buttonhole, was talking to a tall, thin man, attired in a dirty, white linen suit all unbuttoned, and wearing a white …

… invariably gone the same way to his office, had met the same men going to business at the same time and nearly on the same spot, returned home every evening the same way, and again met the same faces, which he had seen growing old.

Every morning, after buying his halfpenny paper at the corner of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he bought his two rolls, and then rushed to his office, like a culprit giving himself up to justice.

He got to his desk as quickly as possible, always feeling uneasy, as if expecting a rebuke for some neglect of duty of which he might have been guilty.

He got to his desk as quickly as possible, always feeling uneasy, as if expecting a rebuke for some neglect of duty of which he might have been guilty.

Nothing had ever occurred to change the monotonous order of his existence; no event affected him except the work of his office, gratuities, and promotion.

He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the Admiralty or at home, for he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues.

… at dinner he discussed the matter hotly with his wife, who shared his angry feelings, and proved to their own satisfaction that it was in every way unjust to give jobs in Paris to men who ought properly to have been employed in the navy.

He was old now, and had scarcely noticed how his life was passing, for school had merely been exchanged, without any transition, for the office, and the ushers at whom he had formerly trembled were replaced by his chiefs, of whom he was terribly afraid.

When he had to go into the rooms of these official despots, it made him tremble from head to foot, and that constant fear had given him a very awkward manner in their presence, a humble demeanour, and a kind of nervous stammering.

When he had to go into the rooms of these official despots, it made him tremble from head to foot, and that constant fear had given him a very awkward manner in their presence, a humble demeanour, and a kind of nervous stammering.

He knew nothing more about Paris than a blind man could know, who was led to the same spot by his dog every day.

If he read the account of any uncommon events, or of scandals, in his halfpenny paper, they appeared to him like fantastic tales, which some pressman had made up out of his own head, in order to amuse minor clerks.

… for he was not fond of innovations, and when he went through the Avenue of the Champs-Élysées every evening, he looked at the surging crowd of pedestrians, and at the stream of carriages, like a traveller who has lost his way in a strange country.

As he had completed his thirty years of obligatory service that year, on the first of January, he had had the cross of the Legion of Honour bestowed upon him, which, in the semi-military public offices, is a recompense for the long and miserable slavery⁠—the official phrase is, “loyal services”⁠—of unfortunate convicts who are riveted to their desks.

That unexpected dignity gave him a high and new idea of his own capacities, and altogether altered him.

She always wore cotton gloves and adorned her head with a cap, ornamented with many coloured ribbons, which was always tilted on one ear, and whenever anyone caught her, polishing, sweeping, or washing, she used to say:

“I am not rich; everything is very simple in my house, but cleanliness is my luxury, and that is worth quite as much as any other.”

As she was gifted with sound, obstinate, practical common sense, she swayed her husband in everything.

When they reached the bridge, they turned to the right and faced the fresh breeze from the river, which rolled along, calm and melancholy, bordered by tall poplar-trees.

The stars looked as if they were floating on the water and were moving with the current.

A slight, white mist that floated over the opposite banks filled their lungs with a sensation of cold, and Caravan stopped suddenly, for he was struck by that smell from the water, which brought back old memories to his mind.

It was like a beam of light illuminating all at once the whole extent of his misfortune, and this meeting with vagrant thoughts plunged him into a black abyss of irremediable despair. He felt heartbroken at that eternal separation.

His life seemed cut in half, all his youth gone, swallowed up by that death.

All the former life was over and done with, all the recollections of his youthful days would vanish;

“That is another queer fancy! Nobody but a woman would think of such a thing.

It is not enough for them to worry you during life, but they cannot even leave you in peace when you are dead.

”

Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the shops were closed, the streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close to the walls.

In this anguish of suspense, men longed for the coming of the enemy.

In the latter part of the day following the departure of the French troops, some Uhlans, appearing from goodness knows where, traversed the city hastily.

Small detachments now began knocking at the doors and then disappearing into the houses. It was the occupation after the invasion.

It now behooved the vanquished to make themselves agreeable to the victors.

After a while, the first alarms having subsided, a new sense of tranquillity began to establish itself. In many families the Prussian officer shared the family meals.

… officers who trailed their mighty implements of death so arrogantly over the pavement did not appear to entertain a vastly deeper grade of contempt for the simple townsfolk than did the officers of the Chasseurs who had drunk in the same cafés the year before.

Nevertheless there was a something in the air; something subtle and indefinable, an intolerably unfamiliar atmosphere like a widely diffused odour⁠—the odour of invasion.

It filled the private dwellings and the public places, it affected the taste of food, and gave one the impression of being on a journey, far away from home, among barbarous and dangerous tribes.

The conquerors demanded money—a great deal of money. The inhabitants paid and went on paying; for the matter of that, they were rich.

But the wealthier a Normandy tradesman becomes, the more keenly he suffers at each sacrifice each time he sees the smallest particle of his fortune pass into the hands of another.

Two or three leagues beyond the town, however, following the course of the river about Croisset, Dieppedalle or Biessard, the sailors and the fishermen would often drag up the swollen corpse of some uniformed German, killed by a knife-thrust or a kick, his head smashed …

… the river about Croisset, Dieppedalle or Biessard, the sailors and the fishermen would often drag up the swollen corpse of some uniformed German, killed by a knife-thrust or a kick, his head smashed in by a stone, or thrown into the water from some bridge.

The slime of the river bed swallowed up many a deed of vengeance, obscure, savage, and legitimate; unknown acts of heroism, silent onslaughts more perilous to the doer than battles in the light of day and without the trumpet blasts of glory.

For hatred of the Alien is always strong enough to arm some intrepid beings who are ready to die for an Idea.

The slime of the river bed swallowed up many a deed of vengeance, obscure, savage, and legitimate; unknown acts of heroism, silent onslaughts more perilous to the doer than battles in the light of day and without the trumpet blasts of glory.

For hatred of the Alien is always strong enough to arm some intrepid beings who are ready to die for an Idea.

At last, seeing that though the invaders had subjected the city to their inflexible discipline they had not committed any of the horrors with which rumour had accredited them throughout the length of their triumphal progress, the public took courage and the commercial spirit began …

The three exchanged rapid and amicable glances.

Although differing in position they felt themselves brothers in money, and of the great freemasonry of those who possess, of those who can make the gold jingle when they put their hands in the breeches-pockets.

The diligence went so slowly that by ten o’clock in the morning they had not made four leagues. The men got out three times and climbed the hill on foot.

Finally the Count seized the bull by the horns. Adopting his most grandiose air, he turned with a bow to the embarrassed young woman and said, “We accept your offer with thanks, madame.”

The first step only was difficult. The Rubicon once crossed, they fell to with a will.

They emptied the basket, which contained, besides the provisions already mentioned:

“You may do wrong to refuse, madame, for it may entail considerable annoyance not only on yourself but on the rest of your companions.

It is a fatal mistake ever to offer resistance to people who are stronger than ourselves.

The step can have no possible danger for you—it is probably about some little formality that has been omitted.”

… beard, which had the tints of his favourite beverage, seemed to quiver fondly, his eyes squinting that he might not lose sight of his tankard for a moment, and altogether he had the appearance of fulfilling the sole function for which he had been born.

You would have said that he established in his own mind some connection or affinity between the two great passions that monopolized his life⁠—Ale and Revolution⁠—and most assuredly he never tasted the one without thinking of the other.

Monsieur and Madame Follenvie dined at the farther end of the table. The husband—puffing and blowing like an exploded locomotive—had too much cold on the chest to be able to speak and eat at the same time, but his wife never ceased talking.

… I see these men wearing themselves out by tramping up and down from morning till night, I cannot help saying to myself, if there are some people who make a lot of useful discoveries, why should others give themselves so much trouble to do harm?

After all, isn’t it an abomination to kill anybody, no matter whether they are Prussians, or English, or Poles, or French?

If you revenge yourself on someone who has harmed you, that is wicked, for you are punished; but let them shoot down our sons as if they were game, and it is all right, and they give medals to the man who kills the most.

We are not so badly off here for the moment, because they do no harm and are working just as if they were in their own homes.

You see, Monsieur, the poor always help one another; it is the bigwigs who make the wars.

”

Nothing was said to shock the proprieties. The ladies, in particular, were most expert in felicitous turns of phrase, charming subtleties of speech for expressing the most ticklish things. A foreigner would have understood nothing, the language was so carefully veiled.

But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded under the influence of this equivocal adventure, enjoying themselves tremendously at bottom, thoroughly in their element, dabbling in sensuality with the gusto of an epicurean cook preparing a toothsome delicacy for somebody else.

The story finally appeared to them so funny that they quite recovered their spirits. The Count indulged in some rather risky pleasantries, but so well put that they raised a responsive smile;

And all this in so discreet and moderate a manner, with now and then a little burst of warm enthusiasm, admirably calculated to excite emulation.

To hear them you would have finally come to the conclusion that woman’s sole mission here below was to perpetually sacrifice her person, to abandon herself continually to the caprices of the warrior.

The two Sisters appeared to be deaf to it all, sunk in profound thought. Boule de Suif said nothing.

They had imagined her timid; she proved herself bold, verbose, violent.

She was not troubled by any of the shilly-shallyings of casuistry, her doctrine was like a bar of iron, her faith never wavered, her conscience knew no scruples.

She considered Abraham’s sacrifice a very simple affair, for she herself would have instantly killed father or mother at an order from above, and nothing, she averred, could displease the Lord if the intention were commendable.

“Who can doubt it, Madame?

An action blamable in itself is often rendered meritorious by the impulse which inspires it.

”

Certainly nobody got to sleep until very late, for it was long before the lights ceased to shine under the doors.

Champagne, they say, often has that disturbing effect; it makes one restless and wakeful.

Next morning a brilliant winter sun shone on the dazzling snow.

Once in a while, on a holiday, he would take an excursion-train to Havre or to Dieppe, to expand and elevate his soul by contemplation of the ocean.

He was full of that common sense which borders on stupidity.

For a long time he had been living quietly and economically, temperate out of prudence, continent by temperament, when suddenly he was seized with a sickening apprehension.

He told his fears to his cousin, who began to laugh, saying to him: “Bah!

Only pay compliments, nothing but compliments, always compliments, that carries off the foolish things, if you happen to say any.

You know Meissonier’s pictures?”

The journalist, taking Patissot’s arm, philosophized in a slow voice: “Every general has his Waterloo,” said he. “

Every Balzac has his foible, and every artist residing in the country has a desire to be a landed proprietor.

”

“

A government, Monsieur, ought to show itself. It is made for that, for nothing else.

People ought to know that on a certain day, at a certain hour, the government will pass through a certain street. In that way people can see it and be satisfied.”

“

If I were in love, Monsieur, I would throw myself into the river.

”

and my brother himself, who had profited by the situation, as he inherited one hundred thousand francs at the death of my uncle, seems to consider me an old libertine. And yet, Monsieur, I swear to you that never since that moment, never, never!—

There are, you see, minutes that a man never forgets.

”

“I am flying from the women, Monsieur!”

Many poets think that nature is not complete without woman, and from that idea, without doubt, came all the flowery comparisons in their songs, which make in turn of our natural companion a rose, a violet, a tulip, and other charming objects.

The need of tenderness that overcomes us at the hour of twilight, when the mist of evening begins to float over the hillsides, and when all the perfumes of the earth intoxicate us, overflows into lyric invocations;

“You are not a Frenchman, Monsieur.

French gallantry is one of the forms of patriotism.

”

“Admit with me that war is a monstrous thing; that this custom of official slaughtering of the people constitutes a permanent state of savagery.

It is odious, since the only real good is life, to see the government, whose duty it is to protect the existence of its subjects, persistently seeking methods to destroy them.

That is so, isn’t it? And, if war is a terrible thing is not patriotism also, since it is the mother idea which supports it? When an assassin kills, he has usually some design, that of robbing;

There you have a staff of three thousand two hundred and five minds. After which you have the army of mediocrities, followed by the multitudes of imbeciles.

As the mediocrities and the imbeciles always form the immense majority, it is inadmissible that they can erect an intelligent government.

“To be just, I will add that, logically, universal suffrage seems to me the only admissible principle, but I assert that it is inapplicable and I will show you the reason why.

“Here are my conclusions: Formerly when a man could not succeed at anything else, he became a photographer; now he becomes a deputy. A power thus composed will always be lamentably incapable, but incapable of doing evil as well as incapable of doing good.

A despot, on the contrary, if he is stupid, may do much evil, and if he is intelligent, which very rarely happens, he may accomplish much good.

“Between these forms of government I do not pretend to decide;

“Here are my conclusions:

Formerly when a man could not succeed at anything else, he became a photographer; now he becomes a deputy.

A power thus composed will always be lamentably incapable, but incapable of doing evil as well as incapable of doing good.

The exterior aspect alone of women reveals that she is not destined for hard physical labor nor prolonged intellectual efforts. Her sphere is another, but not less beautiful one. She puts poetry into life.

By the power of her grace, the glance of her eye, the charm of her smile, she dominates man, who dominates the world.

Man has strength, which you cannot take from him; but you have seductiveness, which captivates his strength. Of what do you complain? Since the world began, you have been queens and rulers. Nothing is done without you.

Her sphere is another, but not less beautiful one. She puts poetry into life. By the power of her grace, the glance of her eye, the charm of her smile, she dominates man, who dominates the world.

Man has strength, which you cannot take from him; but you have seductiveness, which captivates his strength.

Of what do you complain? Since the world began, you have been queens and rulers. Nothing is done without you. It is for you that all fine works are accomplished.

“My revolver is here, on the table. I am loading it. … Never reread your old letters!”

And that is how many men come to kill themselves; and we search in vain to discover some great sorrow in their lives.

“Why, you are mad, nowadays. You are mad! The good God has given you love, the only allurement in life.

Man has added to this gallantry, the only distraction of our dull hours, and here are you mixing up with it vitriol and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of Spanish wine.

”

“Why, you are mad, nowadays. You are mad!

The good God has given you love, the only allurement in life.

Man has added to this gallantry, the only distraction of our dull hours, and here are you mixing up with it vitriol and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of Spanish wine.”

The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men.

If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into medicines for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.

”

“It is love that is sacred,” she said. “Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and women.

Marriage and love have nothing in common.

We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain.

In order to weld those links, we always seek for metals of the same kind. When we marry, we must bring the same conventions together; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races, and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children.

We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has so made us.

Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it was necessary to make them;

We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has so made us.

Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path.

The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men.

Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path.

The world has made laws to combat our instincts⁠—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men.

If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into medicines for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”

“You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognise society.

You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion.

People have written verses telling you that people have died of love. In my time verses were written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page.

You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have written verses telling you that people have died of love.

In my time verses were written to teach men to love every woman.

And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last lover—unless we kept both of them.”

As if, indeed, that could be the case! I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that Society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand?

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love, and they want to deprive us of it.

Nowadays you are told: ‘You must love one man only.’ It is as if somebody were to force me to eat turkey only all my life long. But that man is to have as many mistresses as there are months in the year!

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love, and they want to deprive us of it.

Nowadays you are told: ‘You must love one man only.’ It is as if somebody were to force me to eat turkey only all my life long.

But that man is to have as many mistresses as there are months in the year!

You take everything seriously nowadays, the vengeance of low females who kill their lovers brings tears of pity to the eyes of the twelve citizens come together to probe the hearts of criminals. Is that your wisdom? Your logic?

Women shoot men, and then complain that men are no longer gallant!

”

“What do you want?” he then asked her. And she, with clenched teeth, and trembling with anger, replied: “I want … I want you to marry me, as you promised.” But he only laughed, and replied: “

Oh! If a man were to marry all the girls with whom he has made a slip, he would have more than enough to do.

”

They lived together as man and wife, and one morning he said to her: “I have put up our banns, and we will get married next month.”

She did not reply, for what could she say? She did not resist, for what could she do?

She married him. She felt as if she were in a pit with inaccessible edges, from which she could never get out, and all kinds of misfortunes remained hanging over her head, like huge rocks, which would fall on the first occasion.

“What have I got against you? That I have no children, by God! When a man takes a wife, he does not want to be left alone with her until the end of his days. That is what I have against you.

When a cow has no calves, she is not worth anything, and when a woman has no children, she is also not worth anything.

”

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.

As the winter had been very severe the year before, this longing assumed an intoxicating feeling in May; it was like a superabundance of sap.

“ ‘Monsieur, beware of love! It is lying in ambush everywhere; it is watching for you at every corner; all its snares are laid, all its weapons are sharpened, all its guiles are prepared! Beware of love. …

Beware of love. It is more dangerous than colds, bronchitis, or pleurisy!

It never forgives, and makes everybody commit irreparable follies.’

“

Yes, Monsieur, I say that the French Government ought to put large public notices on the walls, with these words: ‘Return of Spring. French citizens, beware of love!’ just as they put: ‘Beware of paint.’

“However, as the government will not do this, I must do it in its stead, and I say to you:

Oh! What power a woman’s eye has! How it agitates us, how it invades our very being, takes possession of us, and dominates us. How profound it seems, how full of infinite promises! People call that looking into each other’s souls! Oh! Monsieur, what humbug!

If we could see into each other’s souls, we should be more careful of what we did.

However, I was enthusiastic, mad. I tried to take her into my arms, but she said: ‘Paws off!’ Then I knelt down, and opened my heart to her, and poured out all the affection that was suffocating me, on her knees.

She seemed surprised at my change of manner, and gave me a sidelong glance, as if to say: ‘Ah! So that is the way women make a fool of you, old fellow! Very well, we will see.’

In love, Monsieur, we are all boobies at a fair, and the women are the dealers.

“No doubt I could have had her, and I saw my own stupidity later, but what I wanted was not a woman’s body; it was love, it was the ideal.

a doubtful crowd of suspicious characters, half-known, half-sunk, half-recognised, half-criminal, pickpockets, rogues, procurers of women, sharpers with dignified manners, and a bragging air which seems to say: “I shall kill the first man who treats me as a scoundrel.”

The place reeks of folly, and stinks of vulgarity and cheap gallantry.

Male and female are just as bad one as the other.

When they spoke of her, they only said: “Madame Tellier is living at Fécamp,” which might mean that she was living on her own private income.

It was quite twenty miles from Fécamp to Virville, and for a peasant, twenty miles on land are more than is crossing the ocean to an educated person.

The people at Virville had never been farther than Rouen, and nothing attracted the people from Fécamp to a village of five hundred houses, in the middle of a plain, and situated in another department, and, at any rate, nothing was known about her business.

She took her into her warm bed, kissed her and pressed her to her bosom, cossetted her, lavished exaggerated manifestations of tenderness on her, and at last grew calmer herself and went to sleep.

And till morning, the candidate for confirmation slept with her head on the prostitute’s naked bosom.

At five o’clock, the little church bell ringing the Angelus, woke the women up, who usually slept the whole morning long, their only rest after the fatigues of the night.

… there, a wife, a mother, a sister, seized by the strange sympathy of poignant emotion, and agitated by those handsome ladies on their knees, who were shaken by their sobs, was moistening her checked cotton handkerchief, and pressing her beating heart with her left hand.

Just as the sparks from an engine will set fire to dry grass, so the tears of Rosa and of her companions infected the whole congregation in a moment.

Men, women, old men, and lads in new blouses were soon all sobbing, and something superhuman seemed to be hovering over their heads; a spirit, the powerful breath of an invisible and all-powerful being.

You have edified my parish; your emotion has warmed all hearts; without you, this great day would not, perhaps, have had this really divine character.

It is sufficient, at times, that there should be one chosen to keep in the flock, to make the whole flock blessed.

”

“I am sorry you are going; we might have had some fun together.” But Madame replied very sensibly: “

Everything has its right time, and we cannot always be enjoying ourselves.

” And then he had a sudden inspiration:

Is there any stronger feeling than curiosity in a woman?

Fancy seeing, knowing, touching what one has dreamed about! What would a woman not do for that? Once a woman’s eager curiosity is roused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing.

Is there any stronger feeling than curiosity in a woman? Fancy seeing, knowing, touching what one has dreamed about! What would a woman not do for that?

Once a woman’s eager curiosity is roused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing.

I am speaking of women who are really women, who are endowed with that triple-bottomed disposition, which appears to be reasonable and cool on the surface, but whose three secret compartments are filled as follows:

But she felt that she was growing old, without having known life, except in those regular, horribly monotonous, everyday occupations which constitute the happiness of the home.

She was still pretty, for she was well preserved by a tranquil existence, like winter fruit in a closed cupboard; but she was consumed, agitated and upset by her secret desires.

She used to ask herself whether she should die without having experienced any of those damning, intoxicating joys, without having plunged once, just once, into that flood of Parisian voluptuousness.

The other customers, young women and well-dressed gentlemen, gave a swift and furtive but respectful glance at the celebrated writer, who was looking admiringly at the china figure.

They were both equally ugly, as ugly as two brothers who had sprung from the same mother.

“To you the price will be a thousand francs, Monsieur Varin, and that is exactly what it cost me. I should ask anybody else fifteen hundred, but I think a great deal of literary and artistic customers, and have special prices for them.

He looked at her from head to foot, with half-closed eyes, observantly, and then he took in the details, as a connoisseur. She was charming, suddenly animated by the flame which had hitherto been dormant in her.

And then, a woman who gives fifteen hundred francs for a knickknack is not to be met with every day.

But she was overcome by a feeling of delightful delicacy, and turning to him, she said in a trembling voice:

As soon as they were in the room, she undressed herself quickly, and retired without saying a word, and then she waited for him, cowering against the wall.

But she was as simple as it was possible for a provincial lawyer’s wife to be, and he was more exacting than a pasha with three tails, and so they did not at all understand each other.

At last, however, he went to sleep.

I do not remember exactly what year it was.

For a whole month I had been hunting with the concentrated, savage joy that one has in a new passion.

I was in Normandy, at the house of a bachelor relative, Jules de Banneville, alone with him, a servant, a valet and a gamekeeper, in his manorial château.

A biting cold stung our faces and made our eyes water. The sharp air cut one’s lungs and dried up one’s throat.

The deep, clear, hard sky was teeming with stars which seemed paler in the frost. They did not shine like fire, but like stars of ice, shining icicles.

In the distance on the hard, crisp earth we could hear the peasants’ clogs, and the little village bells ringing everywhere in the neighbourhood, throwing out their slender notes into the cold immensity of the night. The countryside was not asleep.

“We shall see them on our way back,” said my cousin.

The waning moon stood on the edge of the horizon, like a sickle in the midst of innumerable seeds of light scattered into space.

From every direction the dark countryside was dotted with dancing lights, all moving towards the pointed spire whose bell rang incessantly. In the farm yards planted with trees, in the shadowy fields these lights glimmered close to the ground.

“My dear, it would be kind of you not to disturb us. We are discussing agriculture. Let Baptiste cut up the cake.”

Since that day no one has ever cut Madame Anserre’s brioche.

She put her two strong, round arms about my neck, and, lowering her voice, as she did when she said “I adorre you,” she whispered:

“Then he would never have got up again.”

I did not understand her, and said: “What do you mean?”

Nothing out of all our dreaming has been realized, or rather it is quite a different thing that has happened, less charming, less poetic, but sufficient for those who know how to accept their lot in this world bravely.

Do you know why we women are so often unhappy? It is because we are taught in our youth to believe too much in happiness!

We are never brought up with the idea of fighting, of striving, of suffering. And, at the first shock, our hearts are broken; we look forward, with blind faith, to cascades of fortunate events.

It does not consist in the arrival of great bliss, for any great bliss that falls to our share is to be found in the infinite expectation of a succession of joys to which we never attain.

Happiness is happy expectation; it is the horizon of hope; it is, therefore, endless illusion

; and, old as I am, I create illusions for myself still, in fact, every day I live; only their object is changed, my desires being no longer the same. I have told you that I spend my brightest hours in dreaming.

As one man, the three others replied:

“Dash it all! dear boy, two days more or less won’t make any difference to him in his condition.”

Thereupon, perfectly at ease, the father-in-law turned round to the undertaker.

Spring, it seems to me, is a season when one should eat and drink landscapes. It is the season for sensations, as the autumn is the season for thought.

In spring the country stirs the body; in autumn it penetrates the mind.

This year I wanted to inhale orange-blossoms, and I set out for the South at the time when everybody comes back from there.

My companion replied mildly:

“It can’t be helped, a man must do his duty!”

Real love requires, at least so it seems to me, both freedom and opposition. Can that which is imposed upon one from the outside, sanctioned by law and blessed by the priest, be love?

A legal kiss is never as good as a kiss that is stolen.

My husband was tall, elegant, and quite the aristocrat in appearance. But he lacked intelligence. He spoke sharply and expressed opinions calculated to wound his hearers.

Then Madame Roubère, dignified and serious, gently said: “You see, my dear, there are times when we are in love, not with any man, but with love itself.

That night the moonlight was your real lover.

”

Can you thwart the forces of nature? No. The senses are also forces of nature, as invincible as wind and sea. They arouse men and sweep them off their feet, impelling them towards pleasure with a desire whose vehemence they cannot resist.

Women who are above reproach are women without temperament, and there are many of them.

I do not thank them for their virtue, for they have no struggle. But never, I tell you, never will the Messalinas and Catherines of Russia be virtuous. They cannot be. They are born for wild caresses.

“

Ever since that time I never draw the curtains, but I am always very careful to lock the door first.

”

he would shake his fist and grimace at him, and touch a piece of iron when the priest’s back was turned, forgetting that the latter action showed a belief after all, the belief in the evil eye.

Now when beliefs are unreasonable, one should either have all or none at all.

I myself am a freethinker; I revolt at all the dogmas which have invented the fear of death, but I feel no anger toward places of worship, be they Catholic Apostolic, Roman, Protestant, Greek, Russian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Mohammedan.

When he had been in Lille about three months Madame Poinçot’s sister called upon him. After long suffering and an unconquerable feeling of despair, the end was near and she wished to see him for one minute, only one minute, before closing her eyes forever.

Absence and time had softened the young man’s anger; he was touched, moved to tears, and started at once for Havre.

She seemed to be sinking fast. They were left alone together, and by the bedside of the dying woman for whose death he was responsible, he broke down completely.

Monsieur Poinçot picked up his hat, which had fallen on the floor, flicked the dust off his knees with his hand, then, while Renoldi was showing him to the door, with a gesture of despair he exclaimed, bowing:

“We are both very unhappy indeed, Monsieur.”

Then he left the house with a slow, heavy step.

And when Monsieur de Courville observed that their friend had made such long and useless attempts, she merely said:

“Nonsense! When a man loves his wife, you know⁠ ⁠… that sort of thing always comes right in the end.”

And Monsieur de Courville made no reply, as he felt rather embarrassed himself.

“What could have taken place in her miserable head after that? Did she attach herself to this little boy, because she had sacrificed for him her beggar’s fortune, or because she had given to him her first tender kiss?

The mystery is the same for the small as for the great.

“For months she dreamed of this corner of the cemetery and of this boy.

The doctor was silent. Then the Marquise, with tears in her eyes, sighed:

“Decidedly, it is only women who know how to love.”

And when he was asked: “Why did you kill them?” he would reply obstinately:

“I killed them because I wanted to kill them.”

Nothing more could be got out of him.

Sportsmen’s dogs and sheepdogs flee in terror from this mournful place, and when one leans over it one perceives a disgusting odour of putrefaction.

Frightful dramas are enacted in the darkness.

When an animal has suffered down there for ten or twelve days, nourished on the foul remains of his predecessors, another animal, larger and more vigorous, is thrown into the hole. There they are, alone, starving, with glittering eyes.

“Well, indeed, when I put Saint Blanc in the rabbit hutch, I was sure he would never earn me another penny. For two years there had been no demand for him.

But the saints, you see, never die.

”

“Just note this: I had committed sacrilege for her sake. I had committed a theft; I had violated a shrine; violated and stolen holy relics, and for that she adored me, thought me loving, tender, divine.

Such is woman, my dear Abbé.

“For two months I was the best of fiancés.

it only occurs in certain abnormal instances, when a person is labouring under some strange influence, or when in the face of vague and unknowable dangers.

Real fear is like a reminiscence of the fantastic terrors of past ages.

A man who believes in ghosts and who imagines that he sees one, must experience the sensation of fear in all its atrocious horror.

Finally she died. The young people experienced a delighted relief which they sought to conceal from themselves as well as from the outside world.

Often one’s conscience is garbed in black while the soul sings with joy.

They were notified that a will had been deposited with a lawyer, and they went to the latter’s office immediately after leaving the church.

A year went by, and war was declared between the pair, incessant, bitter war, almost ferocious hatred. And Madame Bonnin never stopped saying over and over again:

“Isn’t it dreadful to lose a fortune because one happens to have married a fool!”

or “to think that if I had married another man, today I would have an income of forty thousand francs!” or again: “Some people are always in the way. They spoil everything.”

He was an agreeable companion, though rather melancholy, and disillusioned about everything, very sceptical, with a scepticism which was direct and devastating, and especially skilful in exposing social hypocrisies in a biting phrase. He often used to say:

“There are no honest men, or, at least, they only appear so in comparison with swine.”

He had two brothers, whom he shunned, the Messieurs de Courcils. I thought they were by another father, on account of the difference in the name. I had frequently heard that something strange had happened in the family, but no details were given.

Then a lady, in a sweet little voice, declared:

“Well, it is beautiful to have passions like that.”

Man is gifted with physical strength, and he exercises force. Woman is gifted with charm, and she rules with caresses. It is our weapon, formidable and invincible, but we should know how to use it.

We are the mistresses of the world you know.

To tell the history of Love from the beginning of the world would be to tell the history of man himself. Everything springs from it, the arts, great events, customs, wars, the overthrow of empires.

Therefore we reign supreme, all-powerful. But, like kings, we must make use of delicate diplomacy.

Love, my dear, is made up of imperceptible sensations. We know that it is as strong as death, but also as frail as glass.

The slightest shock breaks it, our power crumbles, and we are never able to build it up again.

When we are embraced we lose the sentiment of delicacy, while the man over whom we rule remains master of himself, capable of judging the foolishness of certain words. Take care, my dear; that is the defect in our armour. It is our Achilles’ heel.

Do you know whence comes our real power? From the kiss, the kiss alone!

When we know how to offer and give up our lips we can become queens.

Do you know whence comes our real power? From the kiss, the kiss alone! When we know how to offer and give up our lips we can become queens.

The kiss is only a preface, however, but a charming preface.

More charming than the realization itself. A preface which can always be read over again, whereas one cannot always read over the book.

Pierre Létoile stopped speaking. His companions laughed. One of them said: “

Marriage is a lottery; one should never choose numbers, those drawn at haphazard are the best.

”

… for a neighbour a kind of mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence of a series of misfortunes, as at the age of twenty-five she had lost her father, her husband and her newly born child, all in the space of a month.

When death has once entered a house, it almost invariably returns immediately, as if it knew the way

, and the young woman, overwhelmed with grief, took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks. Then, a species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent crisis, and she remained motionless, eating next to nothing, and only moving her eyes.

As I was looking up in ecstasy, a Lower Normandy peasant came up to me and told me the story of the great quarrel between Saint Michel and the Devil.

A sceptical genius has said: “God made man in His image; man has returned the compliment.”

This saying is an eternal truth, and it would be very curious to write the history of the local divinity on every continent, as well as the history of the patron saints in each one of our provinces. The Negro has his ferocious man-eating idols;

Then I witnessed an unforgettable thing.

They advanced and retreated with childlike grimaces, smiling, balancing, bowing, skipping about like two automaton dolls moved by some old mechanical contrivance, somewhat damaged, but made by a clever workman according to the fashion of his time.

And I looked at them, my heart filled with extraordinary emotions, my soul touched with an indescribable melancholy. I seemed to see before me a pathetic and comical apparition, the out-of-date ghost of a former century.

Are they dead? Are they wandering among modern streets like hopeless exiles? Are they dancing—pale spectres—a fantastic minuet in the moonlight, amid the cypresses of a cemetery, along the pathways bordered by graves?

Their memory haunts me, obsesses me, torments me, remains with me like a wound. Why? I do not know.

No doubt you think that very absurd?

“Almost nothing.

Many courtesans were born to be virtuous women, they say; and many women called virtuous were born to be courtesans⁠—is that not so?

Now, Madame Samoris, who was born a courtesan, had a daughter born a virtuous woman, that’s all.”

“It only remained for me to see her face.

A woman’s face is the dessert, while the rest is⁠ ⁠… the joint.

“I hastened on, and overtook her, and turned round suddenly under a gas lamp.

“

The bodies of such men vanish, but the men themselves remain; and, on the night which follows the stopping of their hearts, I assure you, monsieur, they are terrifying.

“Softly we spoke together of him, recalling speeches and formula of his, and those amazing maxims which are like rays of light thrown, in a few words, on the darkness of the unknown Life.

Paris was blockaded, famished, at the last gasp. Sparrows were getting scarce on the roofs, and the sewers were depleted of their rats.

People were eating anything.

Morissot broke in:

“Under a monarchy you get war against your neighbours; under a republic⁠—war amongst yourselves.”

And they began tranquilly discussing and unravelling momentous political problems with the sweet reasonableness of peaceable, ignorant men, who agreed at any rate on one point, that Man would never be free.

A few bloodstains floated away.

The officer, calm as ever, said quietly: “Now it is the fishes’ turn!” and went back towards the house.

But suddenly catching sight of the net full of gudgeons on the grass, he took it up, looked it over, smiled, and called out: “Wilhelm!”

She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans.

She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself besides be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education.

But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired.

What would have happened if she had never lost those jewels? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or to save!

One Sunday, as she had gone for a walk along the Champs-Élysées to freshen herself after the labours of the week, she caught sight suddenly of a woman who was taking a child out for a walk.

Men paid her marked attentions, and she was amused at their talk and made fun of their gallantries, as she felt sure that she could resist them, for she was rather disgusted with love from what she had learned of it in marriage.

The idea of giving up her body to the coarse caresses of such bearded creatures made her laugh with pity and give a slight shudder of repugnance.

She asked herself how women could consent to degrading contacts with strangers, the more so as they were already obliged to endure them with their legitimate husbands.

He found her altered in character and sadder than formerly, but when he said to her: “What is the matter with you? You seem unhappy. What do you want?” she replied:

“Nothing. Happiness exists only in our dreams in this world.”

Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she received him without any emotion and without regret, for she suddenly perceived that she had never loved him, except in a dream, from which Paul Péronel had brutally roused her.

They all entered, and saw on the ground a few old rags, the beggar’s hat, some bones, some dried blood and remains of flesh in the hollow of a skull.

His pigs had eaten him.

“It had happened on Good Friday, at three in the afternoon.”

I did not try to make him understand how natural it was for the famished beasts to eat their suffering master if he had died suddenly in his hut.

As for the cross on the wall, it appeared one morning, and no one knew what hand had painted it that strange colour.

After that, none doubted that the Wandering Jew had died in that place.

After that, none doubted that the Wandering Jew had died in that place.

I believed it myself for an hour.

He carefully examined the collar, then put out his hand and grasped the neck, twirled it around, drew it towards him, and read upon the green copper that still adhered to the discoloured leather: “Mademoiselle Cocotte, the property of François, the coachman.”

The dead dog had found her master, sixty miles from their home!

He uttered a fearful cry, and began to swim with all his might towards the bank, shouting all the way. And when he reached the land, he ran off wildly, stark naked, through the country. He was mad!

“

It is as good a way as any other of investing one’s money.

”

For the first time in his life he was not bored at the theatre, and spent the rest of the night with some women.

Six months afterwards he married again. His second wife was a very virtuous woman, but very cantankerous. She made him suffer a great deal.

“I also know something strange, so strange that it has been an obsession all my life. It is now fifty-six years since the incident occurred, and yet not a month has passed in which I have not seen it again in a dream.

The mark, the imprint of fear, if you can understand me, has remained with me ever since that day.

For ten minutes I experienced such horrible fright that, ever since, a sort of constant terror is in my soul.

His soul itself seemed hard and definite, like an answer in a catechism. He often spoke to us of God in thundering voice, always uttering the word as violently as though he were firing a pistol.

His God was not God the good and just, but simply God.

He seemed to think of Him as a burglar thinks of a policeman, or a prisoner of the judge.

He often spoke to us of God in thundering voice, always uttering the word as violently as though he were firing a pistol. His God was not God the good and just, but simply God.

He seemed to think of Him as a burglar thinks of a policeman, or a prisoner of the judge.

He brought us up harshly, teaching us to tremble rather than to love.

His God was not God the good and just, but simply God. He seemed to think of Him as a burglar thinks of a policeman, or a prisoner of the judge.

He brought us up harshly, teaching us to tremble rather than to love.

When one of us was fourteen and the other fifteen, he sent us to board, at a special reduced rate, at the seminary in Yvetot. This was a large, dreary building, full of curés, whose pupils were almost without exception destined for the priesthood.

This was a large, dreary building, full of curés, whose pupils were almost without exception destined for the priesthood. I can never think of the place even now without a shudder.

It smelled of prayers the way a fish-market smells of fish.

Oh! That dreary school, with its eternal religious ceremonies, its freezing Mass every morning, its periods of meditation, its gospel-recitations, and the reading from pious books during meals! Oh!

My uncle? He disinherited me in favor of my brother, who, warned by Louise, swore that he had refused to continue living with me because of my dissolute behavior, which he was unwilling to countenance.

I will never marry. Women are too dangerous.

Hang it all! You are quite right to go and attend to your business affairs. I would never be offended at that; on the contrary, it makes me feel quite at home. Off you go, my friends, I will wait for you!”

Monsieur and Madame de Méroul left the following day. He is still waiting for their return.

Once more all doors were opened to him.

He is now mayor of his commune.

And she kissed him, gently, on the eyes.

Mme. Lerebour has no more bad tempers.

Sometimes, on clear nights, the two of them creep furtively past the thickets and flowerbeds to the little greenhouse at the far end of the garden.

But, suddenly, the memory of the attack and of his wounds returned to him, and he was filled with such terror that he closed his eyes in order not to see anything. After a few minutes he grew calmer and began to think.

He had not died immediately, therefore he might still recover.

He felt weak, very weak; but he had no real pain, although he noticed an uncomfortable smarting sensation in several parts of his body. He also felt icy cold, and all wet, and as though wrapped up in bandages.

“

Well, your honour, what can you expect? Nowadays it’s so hard to find good servants⁠—I could never have found a better one.

”

I hardly like to tell you the strange and seemingly improbable reason that urged me on to this mad action.

I am getting married in order not to be alone.

I don’t know how to tell you or to make you understand me, but my state of mind is so wretched that you will pity me and despise me.

I am not afraid of any danger; if a man were to come into the room I should kill him without trembling.

I am not afraid of ghosts, nor do I believe in the supernatural.

I am not afraid of dead people, for I believe in the total annihilation of every being that disappears from the face of this earth.

I am not afraid of ghosts, nor do I believe in the supernatural. I am not afraid of dead people, for I believe in the total annihilation of every being that disappears from the face of this earth.

Well⁠—yes, well, then⁠ ⁠… I am afraid of myself, afraid of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible fear, afraid of the spasms of my terrified mind.

You may laugh, if you like. It is terrible and incurable. I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar objects, which are animated, as far as I am concerned, by a kind of animal life.

I look round, and of course nothing is to be seen, and I wish there were something there, no matter what, as long as it were something tangible: I am frightened, merely because I cannot understand my own terror.

If I speak, I am afraid of my own voice.

If I walk, I am afraid of I know not what, behind the door, behind the curtains, in the cupboard, or under my bed, and yet all the time I know there is nothing anywhere, and I turn round suddenly because I am afraid of …

I cannot remain alone at home, because I know he is there. I know I shall not see him again; he will not show himself again; that is all over. But he is there all the same in my thoughts.

He remains invisible, but that does not prevent his being there.

He is behind the doors, in the closed wardrobe, under the bed, in every dark corner.

It is very stupid, it is dreadful; but what am I to do? I cannot help it.

But if there were two of us in the place, I feel certain that he would not be there any longer, for he is there just because I am alone, simply and solely because I am alone!

Oh, my dear Lucy, never let yourself be kissed by a man without a moustache; their kisses have no flavour, none whatever! They no longer have the charm, the mellowness and the snap—yes, the snap—of a real kiss.

The moustache is the spice.

Imagine placing to your lips a piece of dry—or moist—parchment. That is the kiss of the man without a moustache. It is not worth while.

and one must wear clothes, very few, if you like, but still some clothing. The Creator (I dare not use any other word in speaking of such things) took care to cover all the parts of our body that were made for love.

A shaven lip makes me think of trees that have been felled around a fountain where one hoped to quench one’s thirst and rest.

I recall a sentence (uttered by a politician) which has been running in my mind for three months. My husband, who keeps up with the newspapers, read me one evening a very singular speech by our Minister of Agriculture, who was called M. Méline.

“There is no patriotism without agriculture!” Well, I have just discovered his meaning, and I affirm in my turn that there is no love without a moustache. When you say it that way it sounds comical, does it not?

There is no love without a moustache!

“There is no patriotism without agriculture,” said M. Méline, and he was right, that minister; I now understand why.

Well, I’m growing bolder as I write and I think I’ll tell you the whole story. But promise me you won’t laugh too much.

Don’t expect a comedy. It’s a drama.

You remember my wedding. I had to leave the same evening for my honeymoon. I was certainly not much like Paulette, whose story Gyp has so amusingly related in her witty novel, Autour du Mariage.

Suppose my husband had known. He makes enough fun of me already over our Dieppe adventure. For the matter of that, his jests don’t trouble me much. I am used to them.

One gets used to everything in this life.

…

“

And to think that I began with nothing⁠—my wife and my sister-in-law!

”

Do not despise these rustic affections. These girls have souls as well as bodies, firm cheeks and fresh lips; while their hearty and willing kisses have the flavor of wild fruit. Love always has its savour, come whence it may.

A heart that beats when you make your appearance, an eye that weeps when you go away, these are things so rare, so sweet, so precious, that they must never be despised.

“I have had rendezvous in ditches full of primroses, behind the stable in which the cattle slept, and among the straw in garrets still warm from the heat of the day.

“But what you love most in these pilgrimages of adventure are the country, the woods, the sunrises, the twilights, the light of the moon.

For the painter these are honeymoon trips with Nature.

You are alone with her in a long, quiet rendezvous.

“

Poor solitary beings! Sad wanderers from table d’hôte to table d’hôte, poor beings, ridiculous and lamentable, I love you ever since I became acquainted with Miss Harriet!

“I soon discovered that she had something she would like to tell me, but dared not, and I was amused at her timidity.

“How many unhappy beings there are! I felt that upon that human creature weighed the eternal injustice of implacable nature!

Life was over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which sustains the most miserable of us all⁠—to wit, the hope of being once loved!

Otherwise, why should she thus have concealed herself, have fled from others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so passionately, everything living that was not a man?

What should he say to her now, after all he had said to her in other days, holding her hands and kissing the hair falling round her cheeks? He still thought often of their dike-side trysts.

It was a wicked thing she had done, after all her promises.

Little by little, however, his heart forgot its pain; only a gentle melancholy lingered in it. And one day, for the first time, he took again his old road past the farm where she lived.

As for him, he felt no love for her now, none at all. It was over. Why? How? He could not have said.

The events of the last hour had cured him more effectually than ten years’ absence would have done.

Exhausted and fainting, she asked:

Autumn is here! When I feel the first touch of winter I always think of my friend who lives down yonder on the Asiatic frontier.

The last time I entered his house I knew that I should not see him again. It was towards the end of September, three years ago. I found him stretched out on his divan, dreaming under the influence of opium.

“It is not a physical joy,” he replied; “it is better than that, it is more. I am often sad; I detest life, which wounds me every day on all sides, with all its angles, its hardships.

Opium consoles for everything, makes one resigned to everything.

Do you know that state of mind that I might call gnawing irritation? I ordinarily live in that state. And there are two things that can cure me of it: opium or the Orient.

“

We are the barbarians, we men of the West who call ourselves civilized; we are hateful barbarians who live a painful life, like brutes.

“Look at our cities built of stone and our furniture made of hard and knotty wood.

“Yes—no,” she murmured, “

I am like a lost dog.

”

“My husband died. Then it was the turn of my parents. Then I lost my two sisters.

When Death enters a house, it is as though he hastened to finish as much work as possible so that he need not return for a long time.

He leaves but one or two alive to mourn the rest.

You remember, don’t you? … Don’t speak … listen. When I saw him I was quite overcome, I thought him so handsome; and I remained standing in a corner of the drawing room all the time he was speaking.

Children are strange⁠ ⁠… and terrible.

… Oh, yes … I have dreamed of it!

“

It is much stupider, when one has a legal wife, to pay cocottes.

”

Why? Yes, why was it that he had not married? He might have done so, for he possessed considerable means. Had he lacked an opportunity? Perhaps! But one can create opportunities. He was indifferent; that was all.

Indifference had been his greatest drawback, his defect, his vice. How many men wreck their lives through indifference!

It is so difficult for some natures to get out of bed, to move about, to take long walks, to speak, to study any question.

… still lingered in his soul a singular and unaccountable grudge against the deceased Souris, who had been the first to possess this woman, who had had the flower of her youth and of her soul, and who had even robbed her of her poetic attributes.

The memory of the dead husband spoiled the happiness of the living husband; and this posthumous jealousy now began to torment Leuillet’s heart day and night.

The result was that he was incessantly talking about Souris, asking a thousand minute and intimate questions about him, and seeking for information as to all his habits and personal characteristics.

His studies were not a success, and he failed in his examination for Bachelor of Arts; so, not knowing what to do, he married a pretty girl, for he had plenty of money of his own.

They lived in Paris, like many rich middle-class people do, mixing with their own particular set, without going among other people, proud of knowing a Deputy, who might perhaps be a Minister some day, while two heads of government departments were among their friends.

But Monsieur Sacrement could not get rid of his one absorbing idea, and he was very unhappy because he had not the right to wear a little bit of coloured ribbon in his buttonhole.

“What grieved me so much was not the thing itself, as the lying.

There is nothing so shameful as to be placed under a cloud on account of a lie.

”

We live in a period when practical jokers have the air of undertakers’ men and are generally known as politicians.

We never see them now, your real practical joke, your really splendid rag, your happy little games, the healthy forthright jokes of our fathers’ time. And, however, what is there more amusing and more laughable than such jests?

He had fallen on me, spilling my breakfast in a most uncalled-for fashion over my face.

The very precautions I had taken to close my shutters and sleep in the middle of the bedroom had made me the laughingstock I had dreaded being.

Oh, there was a good deal of laughter that day!

“He’ll never eat any more now,” said a fat, jovial peasant.

“We all come to it in the end.”

This reflection, far from saddening the guests, appeared to cheer them up. At the moment it had come to them to eat the dumplings.

And her husband, more resigned, replied:

“You won’t have to do it every day.”

The men buried the horse just at the spot where it had died of hunger.

The grass came up lush, verdant, and vigorous, nourished by the poor body.

Trembling with delicious terror, she would raise her little black veil, folded double, to the tip of her nose, where it rested, and begin to drink with the pleasure of committing a delightful crime.

Each cherry she swallowed gave her the sense of a sin committed, each sip of the coarse liquor ran down her throat like a delicate, forbidden pleasure.

Then she would say to me in a low voice: “Let us go.” And we left. She went out quickly, her head lowered, with short steps, between the drinkers who watched her pass with resentful glances;

She gave me a long kiss, and murmured in a low voice:

“I was afraid for your eyes, darling.”

Nine o’clock. The stout lady is about to give in, she closes her eyes spasmodically, and her head drops on her breast, but she lifts it up again by fits and starts. Then at last she goes to sleep.

O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness.

You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature.

Alas! there really are preserved fruits of Grasse here, and a thousand other good things to eat. But—it is forbidden to sell them! One may only look at them! And that is so as not to injure the trade of the town!

To exhibit sweetmeats for the mere pleasure of looking at them, and forbid anybody to taste them, really seems to be one of the finest inventions of the human mind.

The Fine Arts are—in preparation! Yet some halls are open, where one may see very fine landscapes by Harpignies, Guillemet, Le Poittevin, a superb portrait of Mademoiselle Alice Regnault by Courtois, a delightful Béraud, etc. As for the rest—when they are unpacked!

Then, after he had signed his name to the letter and sealed it, he turned to his colleague and remarked:

“Look here, my dear friend, I hope this will be a lesson to you never to recommend anyone.”

by the strength of his wrists alone he would climb up into haylofts, where he sometimes stayed for four or five days without stirring out, when he had collected sufficient provisions during his rounds.

He lived like the beasts of the woods, surrounded by men, knowing no one, loving no one, arousing in the peasants no emotion but a sort of indifferent contempt and resigned hostility.

He had been nicknamed “Bell,” because he swung between his two props like a bell between its two hammers.

“After all, we can’t feed the lazybones all the year round.”

The lazybones, however, needed food every day.

He had roamed all over Saint Hilaire, Varville, and Les Billettes without harvesting a solitary centime or an old crust. No hope remained, except at Tournolles;

She was very young, hardly four-and-twenty, small, thin—too thin—and very fair. She was a true Parisian doll: clever, spoiled, elegant, coquettish, witty, with more charm than real beauty. He used to say familiarly to his brother, when speaking of her:

“My wife is charming, attractive, but⁠—there is nothing to lay hold of. She is like a glass of champagne that is all froth⁠—when you have got to the wine it is very good, but there is too little of it, unfortunately.”

He walked up and down the room in great agitation, thinking of a thousand things. At one moment he felt in a great rage, and felt inclined to give the Marquis a good thrashing, to horsewhip him publicly, in the club.

The blood, the hair, the skin, all change, and are reconstituted, and when people have not seen each other for a long time they find, when they meet, another totally different being, although it be the same and bear the same name.

And the heart also can change. Ideas may be modified and renewed, so that in forty years of life we may, by gradual and constant transformations, become four or five totally new and different beings.

He dwelt on this thought till it troubled him; it had first taken possession of him when he surprised her in the Princess’s room. He was not the least angry;

She made a little gesture of disdain.

“Bitterness! I don’t feel any; you are a complete stranger to me; I am only trying to keep up a difficult conversation.”

He was still looking at her, carried away in spite of her harshness, and he felt seized with a brutal desire, the desire of the master.

Her figure was outlined against the brilliant line of the horizon, while her long white robe almost touched the ground; and the grandfather cried: “Look! isn’t this the best thing in the world, after all, father Savon?”

But the old man made no reply, having nothing to say, or perhaps thinking too many things.

A servant opened the door and announced: “Madame is served!”

… tenderness welled up in their hearts, and the word “love,” constantly repeated, now in a man’s strong voice, now in the high, clear tones of a woman, seemed to fill the little room, flitting about it like a bird, hovering like a spirit over them.

Can one love for years without end?

They drew a distinction between various cases, made clear the qualities that divided them from others, quoted examples; and all, both men and women, filled with rushing, disquieting memories which they could not reveal and which hovered on their lips, seemed profoundly moved;

“All the same, her ideal was too easy of attainment, her needs too primitive, her demands on life too simple. She must have been a stupid girl.”

Another woman said slowly:

“What does it matter? She was happy.”

“All the same, her ideal was too easy of attainment, her needs too primitive, her demands on life too simple. She must have been a stupid girl.”

“What does it matter? She was happy.”

In the distance, on the rim of the world, Corsica receded into the night, sinking slowly back into the sea, withdrawing the vast shadow that had appeared as though itself would tell the story of the two humble lovers sheltered by its shores.

She always met him with a cunning look, and one would have thought that she was congratulating herself on the trick she had played him. Seeing how well and hearty she seemed, he very soon got into his tilbury again, growling to himself:

“Will you never die, you old brute?”

He did not know what to do, and felt inclined to strangle her when he saw her.

And when Maître Chicot inherited the farm he said:

“It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken to drink she might very well have lived for ten years longer.”

He was very thin, with wrinkled cheeks and almost white hair that had evidently grown white in a few months. His clothes seemed too large for his dried-up limbs, his shrunken chest, and hollow body.

One felt that this man had been ravaged by his thoughts, by a thought, as fruit is by a worm.

His madness, his idea, was there in his head, obstinate, harassing, devouring. It was eating his body, little by little. It, the Invisible, the Impalpable, the Unseizable, the Immaterial Idea gnawed his flesh, drank his blood, and extinguished his life.

Shrugging his shoulders, the doctor added: “

The mind of man is capable of anything.

”

I frequently saw a poor devil marching barefooted, so painful were his boots, leaving bloodstained footprints at every step. After a while he would sit down for a few minutes, but he never rose again.

Every man who sat down was a dead man.

“How many of these poor exhausted soldiers we left behind expected to start again as soon as they had rested their stiffened legs!

I was twenty-five in those days. I had just come to Paris; I worked in a government office, and Sundays seemed to me extraordinary festivals, full of exuberant happiness, although nothing remarkable ever happened on them.

Every day is Sunday now. But I regret the times when I had only one a week.

How good it was! I had six francs to spend!

Once upon a time he had looked at his fair moustache and curly hair in the little round mirror left behind by his predecessor. Now, every evening, before going, he contemplated in the same mirror his white moustache and his bald forehead.

Forty years had gone by, long and swift, empty as a day of sorrow, alike as the hours of a sleepless night.

Forty years of which nothing remained, not even a memory, not even a grief since the death of his parents. Nothing.

It seemed as though walls must hold something of the people who live between them, something of their ways, their faces, their speech. Houses lived in by happy families are more cheerful than the houses of the miserable.

His room was empty of memories, like his life.

And the thought of returning to it alone, of getting into bed, of going through all the movements and duties of every evening, was horrible to him.

He heard, around him, above him, everywhere, a confused, immense, continuous roar, made up of innumerable different noises, a dull roar, near and distant, a vast vague quivering of life: the breath of Paris, breathing like a colossal being.

The sun, already high in the heavens, threw a flood of light upon the Bois de Boulogne.

A few carriages were driving up and down, and groups of riders were trotting gaily past.

“

What is prettier than a woman asleep?

The body with its soft contours, whose every curve is a temptation, whose plump softness stirs the senses, seems to have been created for the repose of the bed.

Yet, one knows one is alone, and one is strangely tortured by the phantom one has evoked. A heavy, heartbreaking melancholy invades you, as if you were abandoned forever. Everything looks depressing, filling the heart with a horrible sense of isolation and abandonment.

Never return to the house, the room, the woods, the garden, the seat, the town, where you have held in your arms a woman you loved.

“I thought of her nearly the whole night, and by degrees the wish to see her again seized me, a confused desire at first, which gradually grew stronger and more intense.

“And we’re all like that, gentlemen, we Frenchmen.

We remain knights to our dying day, the knights of love and hazard, now that they’ve done away with God, Whose real bodyguard we used to be.

“But no one can take woman from our hearts. She’s there and she’ll stay there. We love her, and we’ll go on loving her; we’ll do any sort of madness for her, so long as France remains on the map of Europe.

“

Yes, we’re great lovers of women, we Frenchmen.

”

In this jostling life, neighbours, strangers, assume considerable importance. Curiosity is aroused, sympathy awaits its opportunity, and the desire to make friends is always alert.

We cherish dislikes for a week and friendship for a month; people are seen with different eyes when viewed through the medium of a meeting at a watering-place.

After an hour’s chat in the evening after dinner, under the trees of the park where the healing spring bubbles, superior intelligence and outstanding merits are suddenly discovered in human beings, but a month later we have completely forgotten the new friends we found so …

“Why haven’t you told him?”

“Because very likely he’d have made me pay for all the free rides!”

The old woman pondered awhile, then picked up her milk pails.

“

With each veil lifted from the unknown world, the human imagination is laid waste a little farther.

You, sir, don’t feel that the night is very empty and filled with a tiresomely commonplace darkness, since it was robbed of its apparitions.

“

When the supernatural disappeared, true fear disappeared from the earth too, for we are truly afraid only of what we do not understand.

Visible dangers can move, disturb, terrify.

But what is that compared with the overwhelming terror that fills your mind when you expect to meet a wandering ghost, or suffer the clinging arms of a dead man, or see running on you one of those frightful beasts invented by man’s fear?

The dark seems light to me, now that it is no longer haunted.

“And the proof of all this is that if we suddenly found ourselves alone in that wood, we should be pursued by the vision of the two strange beings who have just appeared to us in the glare of their fire, rather than by dread …

That day he used those very words: “

We are truly afraid only of what we do not understand.

”

“And suddenly she disappears! Think of it! She disappears not only from your sight, but from everybody’s. She is dead. Do you understand what that word means?

Never, never, never more, nowhere, will this being exist.

Those eyes will never see again. Never will this voice, never will any voice like this, among human voices, pronounce one word in the same way that she pronounced it.

“She lived twenty years, no more, and she has disappeared forever, forever, forever! She thought, she smiled, she loved me. Now there is nothing more.

The flies which die in the autumn are of as much importance as we in creation.

Nothing more! And I thought how her body, her fresh, warm body, so soft, so white, so beautiful, was rotting away in the depths of a box under the ground. And her soul, her mind, her love—where were they?

I climbed over the cemetery wall. I found the hole where her grave was. It had not yet been entirely filled up. I uncovered the coffin, and raised one of the planks. An awful odour, the abominable breath of putrefaction, arose in my face.

Oh, her bed, perfumed with iris!

“However, I opened the coffin and thrust in my lighted lantern, and saw her. Her face was blue, swollen, horrible! Black liquid had flowed from her mouth.

He stood up, leaving her sitting alone in the armchair; he had suddenly turned pale and he said:

“Laurine, you are worse than vulgar.”

In an ecstasy of amusement, she stammered:

Could she have resisted? Could she have denied herself? Would she have had the courage, the strength, not to yield?—for she loved him too. No, certainly no! It would have been too hard! She would have suffered too deeply!

Life is very crafty and cruel!

Can we avoid these temptations, or fly from the fate that marches upon us? How can a woman, alone, deserted, without love, without children, continue to run away from a passion surging in her?

Life is very crafty and cruel! Can we avoid these temptations, or fly from the fate that marches upon us? How can a woman, alone, deserted, without love, without children, continue to run away from a passion surging in her?

It is as though she fled from the light of the sun, to live to the end of her life in darkness.

And how plainly she remembered now the little things, his kisses, his smile, the way he stopped at the door to look at her, whenever he came to her house. What happy days, her only happy days, so soon over!

Remember that I am very near death. And I shall not have seen him again … never again; is it possible? How can I have waited so long? I’ve thought of him all my life, and what a terrible existence the thought has made it!

Not once have I awakened, not once, do you hear, without my first thought being for him, for my child!

How is he? Oh, how guilty I feel before him! Ought one to fear the world in such a case? I should have left all and followed him, brought him up, loved him. I should have been happier then, surely. But I did not dare.

He had the air of a statue come to life, of a racial type: he was like one of those models which are sent to exhibitions.

Too handsome, too tall, too broad, too strong, all his faults were those of excess.

He had broken innumerable hearts.

She’s an attractive woman, too, and with your physique you’re certain to become her lover.

You can’t introduce Hercules to Messalina without something coming of it.

I ought to add, by the way, that though admission to the place is as free as to a shop, you are not obliged to buy what is on sale. Love and cards are the stock-in-trade, but no one will force you to purchase either.

They are braggarts, liars, thieves, as dangerous as their cards, as false as their names, brave because they must be, like footpads who cannot rob their victims without risking their necks.

In a word, the aristocracy of the galleys.

“I adore them. They’re interesting to study, interesting to meet, amusing to listen to, often witty, never commonplace like the dregs of French officialdom.

“Look here. This girl absolutely maddens me.

In arithmetic, one and one make two. In love, one and one ought to make one, but they make two all the same.

Do you know the feeling? The savage need of absorbing a woman into oneself, or of being absorbed into her?

These were the delicious moments of her life. She loved with her whole soul, her whole body, with ecstatic abandon.

She threw herself into love like a suicide into a river, and let herself be carried away, ready to die if necessary, intoxicated, maddened, infinitely happy.

Each time she thought she had never before felt anything like it, and she would have been entirely amazed if she had been reminded of the many different men of whom she had dreamed passionately all night long, gazing at the stars.

and there’s only one way for women, only one way, d’you hear, when you’re a servant! We can’t make fortunes on the stock exchange or at high finance.

We’ve nothing but our bodies, nothing but our bodies.

”

“

Music, that complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, an art made of mathematics and the wind, only happens, then, as the result of the properties of a little membrane.

If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Can one imagine music without the ear? No.

And the ancient spinsters, even skinnier, exposing their British jawbones to the widest extent, looked as if they were threatening the universe with their monstrous yellow teeth.

Walking past them, one caught a whiff of india-rubber and mouthwash.

With growing indignation, Sidoine repeated:

“I married her! I loved her to distraction, as a dream can be loved.

For what your true lover adores is always a dream in the form of a woman.

“You remember the admirable verses of Louis Bouilhet:

“

I have broken my doll to look at her inside.

… I have seen it. … And still I have to go on talking to her, my dear!

“

I have married a woman who is like nothing but a parrot that an old English governness has taught to speak French: do you understand?

”

“

You simply cannot imagine how utterly stupid some women can be.

”

We are here, although we should be in a better place. Then there were two nuns, a little girl in long hair, and an undertaker.

The assemblage looked like a collection of caricatures in a freak museum, a series of expressions of the human countenance, like a row of grotesque puppets which one knocks down at a fair.

The jolts of the carriage made them toss their heads a little, and as they shook, the flesh of their cheeks trembled; and the disturbance of the rolling wheels gave them an idiotic or sleepy look.

He was a real Bashi-Bazouk, a bold rapscallion, ferocious, and gay with a placid Oriental gaiety. He was stout, very stout in fact, but as supple as a monkey, and rode superbly.

His moustaches were unbelievably long and thick, and always gave me a confused impression of a crescent moon and a scimitar.

He had an exacerbated hatred for the Arabs, and treated them with cunning and horrible cruelty, perpetually inventing new tricks, ghastly turns of calculated treachery.

“An excellent idea,” said M. Serbois. “That is what we shall do.”

He had tied a napkin around his neck to keep from spotting his clothes with gravy, and he had the look of a decapitated man continuing to talk

; his fine black whiskers stood out against the white of the linen, and his face was that of a very superior butler.

Life often seemed very hard to Simon Bombard!

He was born with an incredible capacity for doing nothing and with an immoderate desire to follow this vocation. All effort, whether moral or physical, every movement accomplished for a purpose, appeared to him beyond his strength.

Life often seemed very hard to Simon Bombard!

He was born with an incredible capacity for doing nothing and with an immoderate desire to follow this vocation.

All effort, whether moral or physical, every movement accomplished for a purpose, appeared to him beyond his strength. As soon as he heard anyone speak of anything serious he became confused, his mind being incapable of tension or even attention.

His need of money harassed him until he formed the habit of repeating a phrase now celebrated in his circle of acquaintance:

“For ten thousand francs a year, I would become an executioner.”

Now, he went each year to Trouville for a fortnight. He called this “spending the season.”

The entire population of Véziers-le-Réthel had followed Monsieur Badon-Leremincé to his grave; in every memory lingered still the last words of the prefect’s funeral oration:

“At least he was a man of unquestioned honesty.”

Honest he had been in every notable action throughout his life, honest in his speech, in the example he set, in his appearance, in his bearing, in his gait, in the cut of his beard and the shape of his hats.

“

The Parisian woman is the elegant and brazen triumph of artificiality; the provincial, an example of the modesty of truth.

“Yet the wide-awake provincial, with her air of homely alertness, her deceitful, schoolgirl candour, her smile which means nothing, and her good little passions, direct and tenacious, is capable of a thousand times more deceit, artifice, and feminine invention than all the Parisiennes together, for …

And I fell dreaming delightful dreams, as youth will dream, absurd divine dreams.

How swiftly it is gone, the age of dreams, the only happy age in a whole lifetime.

No one is ever lonely, ever sad, ever gloomy or cast down, who bears within himself that most wonderful power of wandering, as soon as he is left to himself, into a world of happy dreams.

Why this joy, this sense of utter delight, deep incomprehensible delight? I knew well enough, however, that I could not buy it. How could I pay for it? No matter, it was for sale.

The caged bird belongs to its owner, the bird in the air is mine, not being man’s.

I went into the garden. Oh, what a delightful garden, with its terraces lifted one above the other, its espaliers with arms stretched out like crucified martyrs, its clumps of golden broom, and two old fig-trees at the end of each terrace!

… showing himself in his ordinary aspect to such a one, this rascally old Death forbears to manifest his presence in grey hairs or in withered limbs or in wrinkles or in that general crumbling down which makes folks exclaim—“Bigre!—how changed he is!”—instead of thus acting,

Death takes pleasure in fattening such a man, in making him monstrous and absurd

, in colouring him up with red and blue, in puffing him out, in giving him an aspect of superhuman health; and all those deformities which in other beings seem pitiable or ghastly, become in his person laughable, droll, amusing.

Thus, everything is uncertain and capable of being estimated in different ways.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Let us formulate that certainty by making use of the old dictum: “What is true on one side of the Pyrenees is false on the other.”

I was walking with Roger one day when a street-hawker bawled in our ears:

“New method of getting rid of mothers-in-law! Buy, oh buy!”

Then Gontran de Vaulacelles, who was listening with a sly look on his face, smiled and said:

“Yes, there was a cabbage. But no one saw it except the abbé.”

She opened a small bag and took out a newspaper. I rubbed my hands: “

Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.

”

I would have liked to comfort her, to caress her as if she had been an unhappy child, to ask her pardon, kneel to her. But I did not dare.

These situations are too stupid.

She grew quiet at last, and we remained each in our own corner, still and silent, while the carriage rolled on, stopping now and then for fresh horses.

Her voice sounded a little troubled; her manner was rather awkward, her glance did not meet mine very readily. But she seemed to have forgotten the whole episode.

I admired her. What instinctive intriguers these bitches are! What diplomatists!

We did indeed arrive in another hour; and a tall dragoon, with the figure of a Hercules, was standing in front of the office; he waved a handkerchief as the coach came in sight.

“Don’t be silly. A woman catches the man she wants to catch, doesn’t she?

As though they had any choice in the matter! And the poor fools still think it is they who choose. But it is we who choose⁠ ⁠… always.

… Women like us, who are not ugly, and no fools, have all men for our suitors, all without exception. We pass them all in review from morning till night, and when we’ve picked one out we angle for him.”

“How do I do it? … Why, I do nothing.

I just let myself be looked at.

”

“Yes, it is a beautiful country.

But no country is attractive that lies so far from the country of one’s heart.

”

“There,” he said, with a smile, “is the only thing I ever look at in this place, and the only one I have seen for ten years.

Monsieur Prudhomme declared: ‘This sabre is the finest day of my life!’ As for me, I can say: ‘This pin is the whole of my life!’

”

The priest examined the passage in his turn and realised that it was too narrow and too stuffed with wax to attempt the expulsion of the beast.

It was the schoolmaster who cleared the path with a match and a bit of rag.

Then, amid general anxiety, the priest poured down this scoured channel half a glass of water which ran over Belhomme’s face and hair and down his neck.

Nevertheless, he was trembling. Was it with terror? Yes. … Perhaps he was still afraid of her?

Who knows how much goaded cowardice has gone to the making of a bold move?

He stopped behind the door that he had reached with furtive steps, and listened.

There is nothing to fear from that imbecile. But it really is incredible that you should not realise how hateful he is to me, how he grates on my nerves. You always seem to love him, to shake hands frankly with him.

Men are extraordinary creatures at times.

”

He carried the tunes in his head; they sang in the depths of his memory for weeks; he would even hum them, beating time with his foot, as he sat at his bock.

The years followed one another, slow and monotonous, and short because they were empty.

He did not feel them slipping over his head. He advanced towards death without stirring, without exciting himself, sitting at a beerhouse table;

How came this wretched, unattractive, and graceless creature to be following a profession that demands infinite attractions, confidence, skill, and beauty? A mystery.

Paris, moreover, is full of harlots ugly enough to disgust a policeman.

What did she do during the remaining six days of the week? She had told us on several occasions that she went to work. At what? We did not care to know; we were quite indifferent to the way in which she managed to exist.

“If you knew how terrible we were … and what awful things we did! We used to tell each other our adventures every day.

We don’t think anything of men, I can tell you.

“As for me, the first trick I pulled off was over an umbrella. I had an old alpaca one, a disgraceful object. As I came in one rainy day, shutting it up, tall Louise says to me:

“Who can say?” the doctor murmured. “

Everyone is capable of it. Everyone in particular, and no one in general.

It must have been a tramp, some fellow out of work. Now we’re a Republic, they are the only people you meet on the roads.”

An unknown little English girl. I did not love her, I did not know her, and a passion of pity for her filled me, overwhelmed me. I longed to save her, to devote myself to her, to commit a thousand follies. A strange thing!

How is it that the nearness of a woman bowls us over like this?

Is it her grace that enslaves and enfolds us? The seductive charm of youth and beauty mounting to our heads like wine?

“

We were saved. I was very sorry for it.

They got us off our raft and took us back to Saint-Martin.

It gives me pleasure to fondle them, to rub under my hand their silky fur that sometimes crackles, to feel their warmth through this fine and exquisite covering.

Nothing is softer, nothing gives to the skin a sensation more delicate, more refined, more rare, than the warm, living coat of a cat.

But this living coat also communicates to me, through the ends of my fingers, a strange and ferocious desire to strangle the animal I am caressing. I feel in her the desire she has to bite and scratch me.

I could have taken a spade and cut the snare, I could have gone to find the servant or tell my father. No, I did not move, and with beating heart I watched it die with a trembling and cruel joy.

It was a cat! If it had been a dog, I would rather have cut the copper wire with my teeth than let it suffer a second more.

When the cat was quite dead, but yet warm, I went to feel of it and pull its tail!

… old habitations of this country have long narrow runways through the walls, which go from the cellar to the garret, from the servants’ rooms to the rooms of the seigneur, and these passages render the cat king and master of the interior of the house.

He goes where it pleases him, visits his domain at his pleasure, sleeps in all the beds, sees all, hears all, knows all the secrets, all the habits, all the shames of the house.

Everywhere he is at home, the animal that moves without noise, the silent prowler, the nocturnal rover of the hollowed walls. And I thought of Baudelaire.

“

One can’t live and have lived.

”

“You see, monsieur, for most people the heart ages with the body. It hasn’t been so with me.

My poor body is sixty-nine years old and my poor heart is twenty.

… And that is why I live alone, with my flowers and my dreams.”

I feel like that sometimes. Don’t you think it’s silly?

I believe we have the souls of monkeys, we women.

I’ve been told (it was a doctor who told me) that the brain of a monkey is very like ours. We must always be imitating someone.

“

Well, when I’m too strongly tempted to do a thing, I always do it.

“So I said to myself: ‘Now, I’ll try it on one of them, just one, to see what happens. What can happen to me? Nothing!

“

Oh! good heavens, Latin, Latin, Latin! I tell you there’s no nourishment in it for a man.

”

As for me, I looked at the omelette they had not finished eating and I wanted to cry and laugh in the same breath.

Life presents us with queer moments and queer sensations sometimes!

Well, we gave my uncle a magnificent funeral, with five sermons over the grave. Senator Baron de Croisselles proved, in an admirable speech, that the sometimes erring heart of your true aristocrat always opens at last to a victorious God.

Nothing moves me so much as this first signal of life when nothing is visible. It stabs the darkness, so swiftly, and so far off, before even the first ray of daylight has appeared on the horizon.

It seems to me in this glacial hour of dawn that this flying sound, carried on the wings of a bird, is a sigh from the very heart of the world.

Karl spoke. “Put out the fire. This must be daybreak.”

They are strange things, these old memories that haunt our minds and will not be dismissed.

This is such an old one, so old that I cannot understand why it remains in my mind so vividly and so tenaciously.

“

In business the cash box comes before flowers.

Little by little we got older without noticing it, being quiet people who hardly think of love. What the heart doesn’t miss it doesn’t grieve over.

“In business the cash box comes before flowers. Little by little we got older without noticing it, being quiet people who hardly think of love.

What the heart doesn’t miss it doesn’t grieve over.

“At last, m’sieur, things went better and our future was safe. Then, really, I don’t know what happened to me, no, honestly I do not. I found myself dreaming again like a little schoolgirl.

“Then I would get up and go and stand on the doorstep to look at the blue sky between the roofs.

When you see the sky from a street, it looks like a river, a long twisting river coming down to Paris; the swallows skimming over it are like fishes.

It’s silly enough to feel like that, at my age! But what can you expect, sir?

“I felt quite young again as we came through the corn.

The heart of a woman doesn’t really grow old!

And indeed I saw my husband, not as he is now, but as he was in those days! That’s true, I swear it, sir. It’s as true as I stand here, I was drunk with it all! I began to embrace him.

“

Go on, shut me up. It’ll give me a roof overhead when it rains.

”

“

How do you expect me to find any if I hid in the woods?

”

Madmen fascinate me.

These beings live in a mysterious land of fantastic dreams, in that impenetrable cloud of insanity where all that they have seen on earth, all that they have loved, all that they have done, lives again for them in an imaginary existence outside all the …

… whim of their fantasy-creating will allows them to become princes, emperors or gods, to possess all the riches of the world, all the good things of life, allows them to enjoy all pleasures, allows them to be always strong, always beautiful, always young, always loved.

Of all creatures on this earth, they alone are happy, since for them reality no longer exists.

I like to hang over their vagabond minds, as one hangs over an abyss in whose depths boils an unknown torrent, come one knows not whence and going one knows not whither.

It is a curious and interesting thing to notice the ease with which men—all men, and even women, all women—can be deceived. We are taken in by the slightest trick of those about us of—our children, our friends, our servants, our tradespeople.

Human nature is credulous, and in order to suspect, guess and overcome the deceit of others, we do not display one-tenth of the finesse which we use when we, in turn, wish to deceive someone else.

“The clairvoyant husbands can be divided into three classes. Those who have some interest, pecuniary, ambitious or otherwise, in their wife’s having a lover, or lovers. These ask only that appearances be observed more or less, and they are satisfied.

… everything that we see unseeing, everything that we brush past unknowing, everything that we touch impalpably, everything that we meet unnoticing, has on us, on the organs of our bodies, and through them on our thoughts, on our very hearts, swift, surprising and inexplicable effects.

How deep it is, this mystery of the Invisible!

We cannot fathom it with our miserable senses, with our eyes that perceive neither the too small, nor the too great, nor the too near, nor the too distant, nor the inhabitants of a star, nor the inhabitants of a drop of water … with …

He answered: “

Do we see the hundred thousandth part of all that exists?

Think, there’s the wind, the greatest force in nature, which throws down men, shatters buildings, uproots trees, stirs up the sea into watery mountains, destroys cliffs and tosses the tall ships against the shore, the wind that kills, whistles, groans, roars—have you seen it, can …

They were presenting a play by the younger Dumas; and his alert forceful intelligence completed my cure. There can be no doubt that loneliness is dangerous to active minds. We need round us men who think and talk.

When we live alone for long periods, we people the void with phantoms.

I returned to the hotel in high spirits, walking along the boulevards. Amid the jostling of the crowd, I thought ironically on my terrors, on my hallucinations of a week ago, when I had believed, yes, believed that an invisible being dwelt in my body.

July 14. Fête de la République. I walked through the streets. The rockets and the flags filled me with a childish joy. At the same time, it is vastly silly to be joyous on a set day by order of the government.

The mob is an imbecile herd, as stupid in its patience as it is savage when roused.

You say to it: “Enjoy yourself,” and it enjoys itself. You say to it: “Go and fight your neighbour.” It goes to fight. You say to it: “Vote for the Emperor.” It votes for the Emperor. Then you say to it: “Vote for the Republic.”

In a strange and wretched fashion I suffer all these pains in my spiritual being. I have no strength, no courage, no control over myself, no power even to summon up my will.

I can will nothing; but someone wills for me⁠—and I obey.

August 14. I am lost. Someone has taken possession of my soul and is master of it; someone orders all my acts, all my movements, all my thoughts.

The Being was on board her, come from over the sea, where his race is born. He saw me. He saw my house, white like the ship, and he jumped from the vessel to the bank. Oh, my God!

Now I know, I understand. The reign of man is at an end.

He is here, whom the dawning fears of primitive peoples taught them to dread.

I love night passionately. I love it as one loves one’s country or one’s mistress.

I love it with all my senses, with my eyes which see it, with my sense of smell which inhales it, with my ears which listen to its silence, with my whole body which is caressed by its shadows.

I go, I walk, sometimes in the darkened outskirts of Paris, sometimes in the neighbouring woods, where I hear my sisters, the beasts, and my brothers, the poachers, prowling.

One is finally killed by what one violently loves.

But how shall I explain what happens to me? How can I ever make people understand that I am able to tell it? I do not know, I cannot tell. I only know that this is—that is all.

I will not set out our story.

Love has no more than one story, always the same.

I had met her and loved her. That tells all.

And for all the generations of the dead, for all the serried ranks of human beings, from the beginning to our day, suffices a very nothing, a field, almost nothing.

The earth receives them, forgets them and effaces them. Goodbye!

At the end of the cultivated cemetery, I came all at once upon the deserted cemetery, the one where the dead of long ago came at their end to mingle their dust with the earth, where the very crosses were rotting away, where the latest …

Gournay is to Gisors what Lucullus was to Cicero. Here everyone is out for Fame; people call us the ‘arrogant people of Gisors.’ At Gournay they think of nothing but their stomachs. We call them the ‘guzzlers of Gournay.’

Gisors despises Gournay, but Gournay laughs at Gisors. This is a comic country.

”

“Lord! It’s only idiots who are not! One is a gourmand much as one is an artist, or a scholar, or a poet.

The palate, my dear, is a delicate organ as perfectible and as worthy of respect as one’s eyes or ears.

Not to have a palate is to be deprived of an exquisite faculty, the power of appreciating the quality of food, just as one can be deprived of the power to appreciate the quality of a book or a work of art.

“ ‘What does it matter to you, therefore, whether virtue be in a male or a female?

Virtue is eternal, of no country and of no sex: it is just virtue.

’

“

A good action is never wasted.

”

but the Empress, convinced that the priest had obeyed a divine call, repeated: ‘What does it matter?

It is better to spare a guilty man than to kill an innocent one.

’ Her advice prevailed. The penalty of death was commuted, and that of hard labour was substituted.

Why had He killed my children? I opened my eyes and I saw that He loved to kill. He loves only that, Monsieur. He gives life only to take it away!

God is a murderer! Some death is necessary to Him every day.

He causes death in many ways, the better to amuse Himself. He has invented sickness and accident in order to divert Himself through all the long months and years, and, when He is weary, He has epidemics, plague, cholera, diphtheria, smallpox;

“There, gentlemen of the jury, you have the simple facts of this murder, which is all the defence he needs.

He revered his second wife blindly because he had justly revered the first.

”

“

Women have, or a woman has?

”

“That’s serious! As for me, I have no power of resistance.

I cannot break with women, I collect them.

Some I only see once a year, others every ten months, others on quarter-day, others when they want to dine out. Those who have their settled days are no bother, but I often have difficulty in placing new ones.”

“I am sure of it.

There are ideas that enter into us, gnaw us, kill us, madden us, if we are unable to resist them.

It’s a sort of spiritual phylloxera.

“From the first, this fortune of two and a half million francs had not dazzled me by any sense of fabulous wealth.

We are used, we people who are always reading offers of this kind, to matrimonial propositions accompanied by six, eight, ten or even twelve millions.

The twelve-million figure is even quite common. It attracts. I’m quite aware that we hardly credit the reality of these promises. But they do accustom our minds to the contemplation of these fantastic figures;

“

What security could I feel with a wife who succumbed so easily!

“I spent a dreadful night, unable to make up my mind, tortured with remorse, harried by fears, torn this way and that by every kind of scruple. But in the morning my brain cleared.

“

Acknowledge your children, sir.

”

I raised my eyes to the portrait of Aunt Rose, and as I looked at her severe, wrinkled face,

I thought of all those women’s souls which we do not know, and which we suppose to be so different from what they really are

, whose inborn and ingenuous craftiness we never can penetrate, their quiet duplicity; and a verse of Vigny returned to my memory:

“No … no … Not this time … not this time. … No … no. … It’s not my fault … not my fault. …

It was a straw mattress did it.

”

“

It is my mother, who died very young.

”

“

In spite of grief one must go on living, you are surely not going to refuse.

Then that will keep you here a little longer. When you are gone, I don’t know what I shall do.”

But you don’t know what a man suffers. To think that a woman—wife or mistress—one loves is giving herself to another, surrenders herself to him as she had done to you, and accepts his kisses as she has done yours. It is terrible, appalling.

Anyone who has suffered that agony is capable of anything.

I am surprised there are not more murders, for all who have been betrayed—every one of them—want to kill, have gloated over the idea of death:

I have retained an unforgettable impression of that evening. All that I had seen, felt, heard, guessed; the fishing excursion, perhaps the octopus too, and that harrowing story amid white phantoms on the neighbouring roofs, all combined to produce a unique sensation.

Certain chance meetings, certain inexplicable combinations of events, contain⁠—without any outward appearance of the unusual⁠—a greater amount of the secret quintessence of life than is spread over whole days of ordinary happenings.

“

I was quite certain that she had fled with this scoundrel. Why? Because she was Allouma, a child of the desert.

Another girl in Paris, a streetwalker, would have run away with my coachman or with a frequenter of the slums.

“A breath of wind! That was reason enough! Did she know, do any of them, even the most introspective of them, know in most cases why they do certain things? No more than a weathercock swinging in the wind.

The slightest breeze sways the light vane of copper, iron or wood, in the same way that some imperceptible influence, some fleeting impression, stirs and guides the fickle fancy of a woman, whether she be from town or country, from a suburb or from the desert.

“They may realise, afterwards, if they consider it and understand, why they have done one thing rather than another;

“Good heavens, yes.

Where women are concerned, one must either forgive⁠ ⁠… or ignore.

”

Now, very nearly drunk, they began to bawl. Each man, with reddened eyes, his fancy on his knee, sang or shouted, hammering on the table with doubled fists, rolled the wine round his throat, giving full play to the beast in man.

In the midst of them, Célestin Duclos, holding tight a tall red-cheeked wench, seated astride on his knee, regarded her ardently.

Not so drunk as the others—not that he had drunk any less—he could still think of more than the one thing, and more human than the rest, he tried to talk to her.

She hesitated, then spoke resignedly:

“One gets through with it. It’s no worse than anything else. Being a servant or walking the streets, they’re both dirty jobs.”

He seemed to approve this truth too.

She made a despairing gesture.

“I see so many men that they all look alike to me.”

He was still staring into her eyes in the grip of a confused emotion, an emotion so overwhelming that he wanted to cry like a beaten child.

“At all of them, sir, and he comes back to me in the morning in such a condition you can’t imagine.

You know, it’s regret that drives him there, and makes him put a cardboard face over his own.

Yes, regret that he’s no longer what he was, and so has no triumphs any more.”