e sweet, silent dusk, moved softly with
noiseless footfall and bent head, as though the dead were there.

Ah, well! they are all gone, those days and nights. Begrudge me not
their memory. I am ugly, and very poor, and of no account; and I die at
sunrise, so they say. Let me remember whilst I can: it is all oblivion
_there_. So they say.

* * *

Whether I suffered or enjoyed, loved or hated, is of no consequence to
any one. The dancing-dog suffers intensely beneath the scourge of the
stick, and is capable of intense attachment to any one who is merciful
enough not to beat him; but the dancing-dog and his woe and his love are
nothing to the world: I was as little.

There is nothing more terrible, nothing more cruel, than the waste of
emotion, the profuse expenditure of fruitless pain, which every hour,
every moment, as it passes, causes to millions of living creatures. If
it were of any use who would mind? But it is all waste, frightful waste,
to no end, to no end.

* * *

Ah, well! it is our moments of blindness and of folly that are the sole
ones of happiness for all of us on earth. We only see clearly, I think,
when we have reached the depths of woe.

* * *

France was a great sea in storm, on which the lives of all men were as
frail boats tossing to their graves. Some were blown east, some west;
they passed each other in the endless night, and never knew, the tempest
blew so strong.

* * *

Winter tries hardly all the wandering races: if the year were all
summer, all the world would be Bohemians.

* * *

We poured out blood like water, and much of it was the proud blue blood
of the old nobility. We should have saved France, I am sure, if there
had been any one who had known how to consolidate and lead us. No one
did; so it was all of no use.

Guerillas like us can do much, very much, but to do so much that it is
victory we must have a genius amidst us. And we had none. If the First
Bonaparte had been alive and with us, we should have chased the foe as
Marius the Cimbri.

I think other nations will say so in the future: at the present they are
all dazzled, they do not see clearly--they are all worshipping the
rising sun. It is blood-red, and it blinds them.

* * *

It is so strange! We see a million faces, we hear a million voices, we
meet a million women with flowers in their breasts