Louis Couperus,
Old People and the Things that Pass…
(1919)
“ She saw the old woman in her imagination. The old woman was sitting, dignified and majestic, frail and thin, in her high-backed chair. She had once been the woman who was able to write that letter full of words red with passion and hatred and madness and the wish to forget, in a fusion of the senses with him, with him who lay there so insignificant, so small, so old, dead now, after years and years. ”
Louis Couperus,
Old People and the Things that Pass…
(1919)
“ No, Steyn knew nothing and was surprised at her question, thinking that Daan must have had business to discuss with Harold, as usual. And he went away, hurried off to Stefanie, to Anton, to Daan and Floor, to the Van Welys; and he impressed upon all of them that the old man's death must be kept from Mamma. They all promised, feeling one and the same need, as children, to keep from their mother the death of the man to whom she had remained so long attached, whom she had seen sitting opposite her, almost every day, on a chair by the window. ”
Louis Couperus,
Old People and the Things that Pass…
(1919)
“ And she know. Through a welter of hatred, passion, jubilation, madness, passionate love and passionate remorse, the letter was clear and conjured up—as in an unconscious impulse to tell everything, to feel everything over again, to describe everything in crimson clearness—a night of years and years ago, a night in silent mountains, by a dark jungle, by a river in flood, a night in a lonely pasangrahan, a night of love, a night of hatred, of surprise, of self-defence, of not knowing how, of rising terror, of despair to the pitch of madness.... ”
