Playwrights From France

"Oh, those bourgeois scum! One day they’d stuff 'em with champagne and truffles till their guts burst!"

"He would have given up everything -- education, comfort, luxurious life and his powerful position as manager -- if only just for one day he could have been the humblest of these poor devils under him and be free with his own body and be oafish enough to beat his wife and take his pleasure with the wives of his neighbors. He found himself wishing he were dying of starvation too, and that his empty belly were twisted with pains that made his brain reel, for perhaps that might deaden this relentless grief! Oh to live like a brute, possessing nothing but freedom to roam in the cornfields with the ugliest and most revolting haulage girl and possess her!"

"Du pain! est-ce que ça suffit, imbéciles ?"

"No, the only good was to be found in non-existence or, if one had to exist, in being a tree, a stone, or lower still, a grain of sand, for that cannot bleed under the heel of every passer-by."

"What idiot imagined that happiness in this world depended on a share-out of wealth? These starry-eyed revolutionaries could demolish society and build a brave new world if they liked, but they would not by so doing add one single joy to man’s lot, nor relieve him of a single pain merely by sharing out the cake. In fact they would only spread out the unhappiness of the world, and some day they would make the very dogs howl with despair by removing them from the simple satisfaction of their instincts and raising them to the unsatisfied yearnings of passion."

"It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians."

"They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger."

"The fire from heaven had fallen on this Sodom in the bowels of the earth where long ago pit girls committed untold abominations, and it had fallen so swiftly that they had not had time to come up, so that to this very day they were still burning down in this hell."

"They, poor devils, were just machine-fodder, they were penned like cattle in housing-estates, the big Companies were gradually dominating their whole lives, regulating slavery, threatening to enlist all the nation’s workers, millions of hands to increase the wealth of a thousand idlers."

"Antagonism breeds extremism, and it was turning one into the zealous revolutionary and the other into an excessive advocate of caution, taking them beyond what they really thought and forcing them to adopt positions of which they then became prisoners."

"When a man was honest in his dealings, you could forgive him the rest."

""And, then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next!" These words were greeted with a burst of laughter, and even the children shrugged their shoulders, for the hard wind blowing from the outer world had taken away all their belief. They harbored a secret fear of ghosts down in the mine, but scoffed at the empty heavens."

"But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored."

"All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir’s barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes—and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody’s elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour’s elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter."

"There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois."

"They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since '89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice."

"What misery! and all these girls, broken by fatigue, were silly enough to come here at night and make babies, more flesh to toil and suffer! It would never end while they went on getting themselves filled with starvelings. Ought they not rather to stop up their wombs and close their thighs tight against approaching disaster? But then, perhaps he was only harbouring these dismal thoughts because he resented being alone when all the others were pairing off to take their pleasure."

"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."

""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."