Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life.

In the midst of all his sadness, Pierre felt deep compassion penetrate his heart. He was upset by the thought that mankind should be so wretched, reduced to such a state of woe, so bare, so weak, so utterly forsaken, that it renounced its own reason to place the one sole possibility of happiness in the hallucinatory intoxication of dreams. Tears once more filled his eyes; he wept for himself and for others, for all the poor tortured beings who feel a need of stupefying and numbing their pains in order to escape from the realities of the world.

He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs on to commit sin.

It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.

It was a house of shadows, where the sunshine was filtered down to a guttering night-light strength between the laths of the window-shutters. (89)

Desprezava os discursadores, os astutos que entram na política como quem entra na advocacia, para ganhar dinheiro com a retórica.

But you said so yourself,the poor lass will die of it...Do you really want her to die?
'Yes, I'd rather she died than have a bad life.

A horribly bitter taste came into his mouth: the futility of everything, the eternal pain of existence.

À eux deux, la femme, nerveuse et hypocrite, l'homme, sanguin et vivant en brute, ils faisaient un couple puissamment lié. Ils se complétaient, se protégeaient mutuellement. Le soir, à table, dans les clartés pâles de la lampe, on sentait la force de leur union, à voir le visage épais et souriant de Laurent, en face du masque muet et impénétrable de Thérèse.

Living in musty shadows and dismal, oppressive silence, Thérèse could see her whole life stretching out before her totally void, bringing night after night the same cold bed and morning after morning the same empty day.

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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.

"Cependant Quenu se rappelait une phrase de Charvet, cette fois, qui déclarait que "ces bourgeois empâtés, ces boutiquiers engraissés, prêtant leur soutien à un gouvernement d' indigestion générale, devaient êtres jetés les premiers au cloaque." C' était grâce à eux, grâce à leur égoïsme du ventre, que le despotisme s' imposait et rongeait une nation."

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.