Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other.
All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel.
It seemed to her that certain places on the earth must yield happiness, like a plant peculiar to that soil and growing poorly anywhere else.
La parole est un laminoir qui allonge toujours les sentiments.
Love, that marvelous thing which had hitherto been like a great rosy-plumaged bird soaring in the splendors of poetic skies, was at last within her grasp.
This man could teach you nothing; he knew nothing, he wished for nothing. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought to him.
Poor thing! She had loved him, after all.
A man, at any rate, is free. He can explore the passions and the continents, can surmount obstacles, reach out to the most distant joys. Whereas a woman is constantly thwarted. At once inert and pliant, she has to contend with both physical weakness and legal subordination. Her will is like the veil on her bonnet, fastened by a single string and quivering at every breeze that blows. Always there is a desire that impels and a convention that restrains.
Even at table she would bring her book, leafing through the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Vicomte always recurred in her reading. She drew comparisons between him and the invented characters. But little by little the circle whose centre he occupied widened around him, and that halo of glory he wore, straying from his face, spread itself further off, to illuminate other dreams.
The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing.
My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my own doubt.
But what was making her so unhappy? Where was the extraordinary catastrophe that had overturned her life? And she lifted her head and looked around, as though seeking the cause of what hurt her so.
Their great love, in which she lived totally immersed, seemed to be subsiding around her, like the river sinking into its bed... and she could see the mud at the bottom.
Tout au milieu, et dans le disque meme du soleil, rayonne la face de Jesus-Christ. Antoine fait le signe de la croix et se remet en prieres.
Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble.
Un infini de passions peut tenir dans une minute, comme une foule dans un petit espace.
The next day, for Emma, was funereal. Everything appeared to her shrouded in a black mist that hovered uncertainly over the surface of things, and grief plunged deep into her soul, moaning softly like the winter wind in an abandonded chateau. She sank into that kind of brooding which comes when you lose something forever, that lassitude you feel after every irreversible event, that pain you suffer when a habitual movement is interrupted, when a long-sustained vibration is suddenly broken off.
And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what that chance would be, what wind would waft it to her, where it would set her ashore, whether it was a launch or a three-decker, laden with anguish or filled to the portholes with happiness. But every morning when she woke she hoped to find it there.
Would this misery last for ever? Was there no escape? Was she not quite as good as all the lucky women? She had seen duchesses at La Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways than she; she cursed the injustice of God. She propped her head against the wall and wept, for envy of those hectic lives, the shameless pleasure-seeking, the masked balls, and all the wild delights, unknown to her, that they must afford.
Dietro le Tuileries, il cielo si tingeva di ardesia, gli alberi del giardino formavano due masse enormi, violacee in alto. Si accendevano i lampioni a gas, e la Senna, verdastra in tutta la sua estensione, si lacerava in un marezzo d’argento contro i pilastri del ponte.