Guy de Maupassant,
Who Knows? — Part I
(1890)
“ I like solitude so much that I cannot even endure the vicinage of other beings sleeping under the same roof. I cannot live in Paris, because there I suffer the most acute agony. I lead a moral life, and am therefore tortured in body and in nerves by that immense crowd which swarms and lives even when it sleeps. Ah! the sleeping of others is more painful still than their conversation. ”
Guy de Maupassant,
Who Knows? — Part I
(1890)
“ It was one o'clock in the morning, one o'clock or maybe half-past one; the sky had by this time cleared somewhat and the crescent appeared, the gloomy crescent of the last quarter of the moon. The crescent of the first quarter is that which rises about five or six o'clock in the evening and is clear, gay, and fretted with silver; but the one which rises after midnight is reddish, sad, and desolating--it is the true Sabbath crescent. Every prowler by night has made the same observation. ”
Guy de Maupassant,
Who Knows? — Part I
(1890)
“ Through the walls I distinguished this continued noise,--I should rather say agitation than noise,--an indistinct moving about of a pile of things, as if people were tossing about, displacing, and carrying away surreptitiously all my furniture.I doubted, however, for some considerable time yet, the evidence of my ears. But having placed my ear against one of the outhouses, the better to discover what this strange disturbance was, inside my house, I became convinced, certain, that something was taking place in my residence which was altogether abnormal and incomprehensible. ”
