I am not in pain. I am extraordinarily calm; I am drunk with tranquillity. Are they dead, all — those? I do not know. The dead are specters of the li… - Henri Barbusse

But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs anymore. I stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is enraged against me.

I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.

I shall not be able to listen anymore, or look into the room, or hear anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.

There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they discover what we no longer knew.

"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies. It's a reward to talk. Perhaps it's the only reward there is." She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart.