Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it. - Patrick Süskind

He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep.

No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating—and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the world outside.

It was good, really, that this external world still existed, if only as a place of refuge.