I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.
First my husband, then my parents died. After that I lost my two sisters. When death comes to someone’s home it’s as if it wants to get as much done as quickly as possible to save coming again for a long time.
Ah! Those silly songs make us lose our heads; and, believe me, never marry a woman who sings in the country, especially if she sings the song of Musette!
But she shook with rage, and got up one of those conjugal scenes which make a peaceable man dread the domestic hearth more than a battlefield where bullets are raining.
Philippe-Auguste was an ugly child, with uncombed hair and dirt all over him, and the face of a cretin.
Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r’s in it.
Our senses are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature a harmony.
She hardly gave a thought to Julien; nothing in him surprised her any longer. But the double treachery of the Countess, her friend, disgusted her. Everyone in the world was a traitor, a liar, a deceiver, and tears came into her eyes. One sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness comprised of all this homage, admiration, these awakened desires and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman’s heart.
What do you want?” he then asked her. And with clenched teeth, and trembling with anger, she 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.
Death need not be sad, it should be a matter of indifference.
His life had gone by without adventures, without passions, almost without hopes. The facility of dreaming, planted in every man, had never blossomed in the narrow bed of his ambitions.
Monsieur Lerebour was short, round and jovial, with the joviality of a shopkeeper who liked to do himself well. His wife, who was thin, self-willed and perpetually discontented, had still not succeeded in overcoming her husband’s good humour.
Some people are Freethinkers from sheer stupidity. My Uncle Sosthenes was one of these. Some people are often religious for the same reason.
He did not know how to make her understand that he would be happy, most happy, to become her husband in his turn. He certainly could not tell her that, now, at this moment, in this place, in the presence of this corpse; nevertheless he could, he believed, find one of those ambiguous, acceptable, complicated statements whose words have hidden significance, and which can, by their calculated reservations, express everything you intend.
Describing Ostend oysters: “small and rich, looking like little ears enfolded in shells, and melting between the palate and the tongue like salted sweets.
There can be no doubt that loneliness is dangerous to active minds.
He was one of those many-faced politicians without any strong beliefs, with no great resources, no backbone and no real knowledge of anything, a country lawyer with provincial good looks, craftily walking the tight-rope between any extremist parties, a kind of republican Jesuit, a sort of dubious little mushroom such as flourish in their hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage.
I drink to the victory of the mind over the millions.
She removed the wraps, which covered her shoulders, before the glass, so as once more to see herself in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She had no longer the necklace around her neck!
How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!