Journalists From France

"Il y avait des hommes si ambitieux qu'ils auraient torché les chefs, pour les entendre seulement dire merci."

"Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm."

"It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks bursting out of her breeches."

"Pendant une demi-heure, le puits en dévora de la sorte, d'une gueule plus ou moins gloutonne, selon la profondeur de l'accrochage où ils descendaient, mais sans un arrêt, toujours affamé, de boyaux géants capables de digérer un peuple."

"If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy."

"Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like."

"Now Étienne could oversee the entire country. The darkness remained profound, but the old man's hand had, as it were, filled it with great miseries, which the young man unconsciously felt at this moment around him everywhere in the limitless tract. Was it not a cry of famine that the March wind rolled up across this naked plain? The squalls were furious: they seemed to bring the death of labour, a famine which would kill many men. And with wandering eyes he tried to pierce shades, tormented at once by the desire and by the fear of seeing. Everything was hidden in the unknown depths of the gloomy night. He only perceived, very far off, the blast furnaces and the coke ovens. The latter, with their hundreds of chimneys, planted obliquely, made lines of red flame; while the two towers, more to the left, burnt blue against the blank sky, like giant torches. It resembled a melancholy conflagration. No other stars rose on the threatening horizon except these nocturnal fires in a land of coal and iron."

"On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet."

"If the world is to die of misery, at any rate let it die cheerfully, and in sympathy with itself!"

"The ground was trembling under their feet, and they clung to the resolutions made in their calmer hours so as not to sink into the abyss."

"His was the sceptical boredom of all his generation, no longer the romantic boredom of the Werthers and Renés, regretfully lamenting the passing of old beliefs, but the boredom of the new, doubting heroes, the young chemists who angrily declare the world an impossible place because they have not suddenly found life at the bottom of their retorts."

"Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?"

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

"She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn’t give yourself?"

"Boredom was at the root of Lazare’s unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it."

"The sea with its perpetual surging, its stubborn waves that broke against the cliffs twice a day, irritated him as being a mere senseless force that recked nothing of his grief, and had gone on wearing the same rocks away for centuries, without ever shedding a single tear for the death of a human being. It was too vast, too cold; and he hurried back home again and shut himself up in his room, that he might feel less conscious of his own littleness, less crushed between the boundlessness of sea and sky."

"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."

"How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one’s last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion’s charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness."

"His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by wavering faith, were replaced by his bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Woman now came and spent her leisure time in his establishment, those shivering anxious hours which she had formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, an ever renewed struggle of the god of dress against the husband, an ever renewed worship of the body with the promise of future divine beauty."

"A woman's opinion, however humble she may be, is always worth listening to, if she's got any sense... If you put yourself in my hands, I shall certainly make a decent man of you."

"You don't understand this language, old fellow: otherwise you'd know that action contains its own reward. To act, to create, to fight against facts, to overcome them or be overcome by them—the whole of human health and happiness is made up of that!"

"Crever pour crever, je préfère crever de passion que de crever d'ennui!"

"Mais il avait oublié l’inventaire, il ne voyait pas son empire, ces magasins crevant de richesses. Tout avait disparu, les victoires bruyantes d’hier, la fortune colossale de demain. D’un regard désespéré, il suivait Denise, et quand elle eut passé la porte, il n’y eut plus rien, la maison devint noire."

"She was not shocked; it seemed to her that every woman had a right to arrange her life as she liked, when she was alone and free in the world. For her own part, however, she had never given way to such ideas; her sense of right and her healthy nature naturally maintained her in the respectability in which she had always lived."

"It was the usual story of penniless young men, who think themselves obliged by their birth to choose a liberal profession and bury themselves in a sort of vain mediocrity, happy even when they escape starvation, notwithstanding their numerous degrees."

"You know, they’ll have their revenge." "Who will?" "The women, of course."

"La certitude d'avoir empêche de désirer."

"He wept for truth which was dead, for Heaven which was void. Beyond the marble walls and gleaming jewelled altars, the huge plaster Christ had no longer a single drop of blood in its veins."

"Monsieur Josserand died very quietly—a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings he had ever loved."

"She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself."

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

""Those beasts have everything and we get nothing—not even a crust if we’re starving! The only thing they’re fit for is to be taken in! Just mark my words!" Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother’s pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function in life was to marry and to pay."

"The shelves had the melancholy emptiness and the false luxury of families where inferior meat is purchased so as to be able to put flowers on the table."

"Her anger was rekindled. "You see, I keep it to myself, but, oh! it’s more than I can stand. Don’t say anything, sir; don’t say anything, or I’ll explode!" He said nothing, and she exploded all the same."

"When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium."

"Like those antique monsters whose redoubtable domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls. She was ringed round with catastrophes."

"The rage for debasing things was inborn in her. It did not suffice her to destroy them, she must soil them too."

"At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre."

"Alors, Nana, tout de suite, entama La Faloise. Il postulait depuis longtemps l'honneur d'être ruiné par elle, afin d'être parfaitement chic."

"A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to rot on the ground by himself."

"Existence is so bitter for every one of us! Ought we not to forgive others much, my friend, if we wish to merit forgiveness ourselves?"

"Great disorders lead to great conversions. Providence would have its opportunity."

"Amid that company of gentlemen with the great names and the old upright traditions;, the two women sat face to face, exchanging tender glances, conquering, reigning, in tranquil defiance of the laws of sex, in open contempt for the male portion of the community. The gentlemen burst into applause."

"Satin occupied a couple of rooms, which a chemist had furnished for her in order to save her from the clutches of the police; but in little more than a twelvemonth she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs, dirtied the curtains, and that in a manner so furiously filthy and untidy, that the lodgings seemed as though inhabited by a pack of mad cats."

"Madame Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years."

"Ce fut une jouissance mêlée de remords, une de ces jouissances de catholique que la peur de l’enfer aiguillonne dans le péché."

"He was a young dandy, and his habiliments, even to his gloves, were entirely yellow."

"She offered herself to him with that quiet expression which is peculiar to a good-natured courtesan."

"The night threatened to end in the unloveliest way. In a corner by themselves, Maria Blond and Léa de Horn had begun squabbling at close quarters, the former accusing the latter of consorting with people of insufficient wealth."

"The air there was heavy with the somnolence which accompanies a long vigil, and the lamps cast a wavering light, whilst their burnt-out wicks glowed red within their globes. The ladies had reached that vaguely melancholy hour when they felt it necessary to tell each other their histories."