For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.

The first human corpse I saw had housed my grandmother’s soul. I expected a serene mien. I expected to find her sleeping. I expected a transforming beauty, something painted by Millais. Instead, the old whore petticoats of skin.

[looking at the dead body of his first wife Camille, 5 Sept 1879], watching her tragic forehead, almost mechanically observing the colors which death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue. Blue, yellows, grey, what do I know?.. .How natural to to want to reproduce the last image of her, who was leaving us for ever.But even before the idea came to me to record her beloved features, something in me automatically responded tot the shocks of colours. I just seem to be compelled in an unconsciousness activity, the one I engage in every day, like an animal turning in its mill.

I — I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday — nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time — his death and her sorrow — I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together — I heard them together.

She was young and very beautiful, but pale, like the grey pallor of death.

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes — is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it.

I came in haste with cursing breath,
And heart of hardest steel;
But when I saw thee cold in death,
I felt as man should feel.

For when I look upon that face,
That cold, unheeding, frigid brown,
Where neither rage nor fear has place,
By Heaven! I cannot hate thee now!

As young people, my generation would see a lot of death. I don't think I ever grew accustomed to it. It came in darkness and fervor, by our airplanes, rifles, parachutes, and tanks. But there was something about that first death I experienced the summer of 1939 when I was just eighteen, years before the war, that stayed with me so strongly. Those first few seasons after my father died were dark indeed.

She was dead, but her very death heightened that word "supernatural"; it was what she, not being, was.

Its limbs were loose, graceless, lying in an uncomfortable position. Unmoving. Just like any corpse. In life, every man was unique. In death every man was meat.

She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead

There is something female about being dead.