MINUET

Great misfortunes do not affect me very much, said John Bridelle, an old
bachelor who passed for a sceptic. I have seen war at quite close
quarters; I walked across corpses without any feeling of pity. The great
brutal facts of nature, or of humanity, may call forth cries of horror or
indignation, but do not cause us that tightening of the heart, that
shudder that goes down your spine at sight of certain little heartrending
episodes.

The greatest sorrow that anyone can experience is certainly the loss of a
child, to a mother; and the loss of his mother, to a man. It is intense,
terrible, it rends your heart and upsets your mind; but one is healed of
these shocks, just as large bleeding wounds become healed. Certain
meetings, certain things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret
sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a whole world of
painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of
moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they
appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the
more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls
a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of
disenchantment, from which it takes a long time to free ourselves.

I have always present to my mind two or three things that others would
surely not have noticed, but which penetrated my being like fine, sharp
incurable stings.

You might not perhaps understand the emotion that I retained from these