Light

I have been to the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had found myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There are many new faces. The factory has tripled--q...

I am dead. I fall, I roll like a broken bird into bewilderments of light, into canyons of darkness. Vertigo presses on my entrails, strangles me, plunges into me. I drop sheer i...

We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies. At long intervals the train would...

We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done. Evening came, then night--nothing happened. On the morning of the fifth day some of us were leaning, full of...

I am leaning this evening out of the open window. As in bygone nights, I am watching the dark pictures, invisible at first, taking shape--the steeple towering out of the hollow,...

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also. The lull is fantastic. The longer it lasts the more it pierces us with the uneasiness of beasts. We lived i...

It is Sunday. Through my open window a living ray of April has made its way into my room. It has transformed the faded flowers of the wallpaper and restored to newness the Turke...

At seven in the evening one hears the clock strike gently, and then the instant tumult of the bell. I close the desk, wipe my pen, and put it down. I take my hat and muffler, af...

Through the panes I see the town--I often take refuge at the windows. Then I go into Marie's bedroom, which gives a view of the country. It is such a narrow room that to get to...

At the time of the great military maneuvers of September, 1913, Viviers was an important center of the operations. All the district was brightened with a swarming of red and blu...

One after another, sundry women have occupied my life. Antonia Véron was first. Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction, threw us back upon each other as of yore....

Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons' account--I remember that detail--there came an unusual sound of steps and voices, and before I could even tu...

The seat leans against the gray wall, at the spot where a rose tree hangs over it, and the lane begins to slope to the river. I asked Marie to come, and I am waiting for her in...

I am in a bed, in a room. There is no noise--a tragedy of calm, and horizons close and massive. The bed which imprisons me is one of a row that I can see, opposite another row....

"No," said Crillon, who was there, too, "I know well enough there'll be war some day, seeing there's always been war after war since the world was a world, and therefore there'l...

It is an autumnal day--gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaves lie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it is an autumn day all the same. Days do...

It was a wooden building, gay with flags, which the municipality had erected; and Room 1 was occupied by an exhibition of paintings and drawings by amateurs in high society, all...

I have not changed my place. I open my eyes. Have I been sleeping? I do not know. There is tranquil light now. It is evening or morning. My arms alone can tremble. I am enrooted...

I put on my clothes of former days. I catch myself paying spruce attention to my toilet, since it is Sunday, by reason of the compulsion one feels to do the same things again.

We rearranged the house. We did not alter the general arrangement, nor the places of the heavy furniture--that would have been too great a change. But we cast out all the dusty...

I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler's lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to understand. So I inform myself in the m...

I am alone on the earth, face to face with the mud, and I can no longer move. The frightful searching of the shells alights around me. The hoarse hurricane which does not know m...

We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of mist which was torn by blasts of d...