If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are tr… - Alfred de Musset

Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these
children: behind them a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its
ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the
aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between
these two worlds — like the ocean which separates the Old World from the
New — something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage,
traversed from time to time by some distant sail or some ship trailing
thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past
from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles
both, and where one can not know whether, at each step, one treads on
living matter or on dead refuse.

Le mal existe, mais pas sans le bien, comme l'ombre existe, mais pas sans la lumière.

Evil exists, but not without the good, as the shadow exists, but not without the light.

(III, 3)

As all the perfumes of the vanished day
Rise from the earth still moistened with the dew
So from my chastened soul beneath thy ray
Old love is born anew.