Su locura, su idea, estaba allí, en aquella cabeza obstinada, torturante, devoradora. Se comía el cuerpo poco a poco. Ella la invisible, la impalpabl… - Guy de Maupassant

"Quant à moi, maintenant, j'ai fermé mon âme. Je ne dis plus à personne ce que je crois, ce que je pense et ce que j'aime. Me sachant condamné à l'horrible solitude, je regarde les choses, sans jamais émettre mon avis. Que m'importent les opinions, les querelles, les plaisirs, les croyances ! Ne pouvant rien partager avec personne, je me suis désintéressé de tout. Ma pensée, invisible, demeure inexplorée. J'ai des phrases banales pour répondre aux interrogations de chaque jour, et un sourire qui dit "oui", quand je ne veux même pas prendre la peine de parler."

For a number of years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped, like everyone else. And for him it was over, over for good. A life! A few days, and the nothing! You're born, you grow up, you're happy, you wait, then you die. Goodbye! Man or woman, you'll never return to this earth! And yet each of us bears within him the fierce, unrealizable longing for eternity, each of us is a kind of universe within the universe, and each of us soon vanishes completely into the dunghill of new organisms. Plants, animals, men, stars, worlds, everything quickens, then dies, in order to transform itself. And nothing ever returns, whether insect, man, or planet!

The same thing happens whenever the established order of things is upset, when security no longer exists, when all those rights usually protected by the law of man or of Nature are at the mercy of unreasoning, savage force. The earthquake crushing a whole nation under falling roofs; the flood let loose, and engulfing in its swirling depths the corpses of drowned peasants, along with dead oxen and beams torn from shattered houses; or the army, covered with glory, murdering those who defend themselves, making prisoners of the rest, pillaging in the name of the Sword, and giving thanks to God to the thunder of cannon — all these are appalling scourges, which destroy all belief in eternal justice, all that confidence we have been taught to feel in the protection of Heaven and the reason of man.