The pride of abnegation had vanished, and she was willing that those she loved should be happy through other instrumentality than her own. - Émile Zola

Oh, that’s typical of you modern young men; you’ve nibbled at science and it’s made you ill, because you’ve not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You’d like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we’re only just beginning to understand it, and it’ll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won’t have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism... Yes, it’s the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you’re all inverted Werthers.

She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself.

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.