The Last Cavalier ~Dumas
"What's more, they could speak to passing travelers through the mouths of their tombs; for each man had his epitaph. In an epitaph a man's character survives the grave. So says a modest man: I was, I am no longer. That is all my life and all my death."
"He writes for all those giddy young people, for the false-hearted women and young men of means who have left their health in brothels and their purses in taverns, for the idle and lazy and vain: all of them, above all, Italian, but cantankerous like the English, proud like the Spanish and quarrelsome like the Gauls."
"[Rene] shrugged, and said to himself, 'You never know where in the devil gratitude might pop up.'"
" 'So Dr. Guillotin would not be simply an accident of chance and his machine an accident of mechanics?' "
'No, it arrived at its appointed hour, just like all absolute, fatal things...General, we are living in revolution's troubled times, and atoms like us have a difficult time living through them.' "
"It is impossible to describe the effect his short lamentation had on his audience. It was reinforced by his melancholic accompaniment, in which they seemed to hear the last murmurs of the leaves and the wind's final sigh. And then it ended with a cry from the instrument, just like the sound a human heart might makes as it breaks, or like a harp string as it snaps."
"He writes for all those giddy young people, for the false-hearted women and young men of means who have left their health in brothels and their purses in taverns, for the idle and lazy and vain: all of them, above all, Italian, but cantankerous like the English, proud like the Spanish and quarrelsome like the Gauls."
"[Rene] shrugged, and said to himself, 'You never know where in the devil gratitude might pop up.'"
" 'So Dr. Guillotin would not be simply an accident of chance and his machine an accident of mechanics?' "
'No, it arrived at its appointed hour, just like all absolute, fatal things...General, we are living in revolution's troubled times, and atoms like us have a difficult time living through them.' "
"It is impossible to describe the effect his short lamentation had on his audience. It was reinforced by his melancholic accompaniment, in which they seemed to hear the last murmurs of the leaves and the wind's final sigh. And then it ended with a cry from the instrument, just like the sound a human heart might makes as it breaks, or like a harp string as it snaps."