Do not forget; Auger is touched with grace; but Gregoire will be damned if you do not hold out your hand to him.
God Himself, who has withheld grace from the damned, must feel pity for them.
It is a very artless desire for equality which makes us say that all men are equal in the presence of suffering. No! no! they are not. And as we know nothing of Death but that which precedes and determines it, men are not even equal in the presence of Death.
NIGHTS IN ARTOIS
I
One more glance into the dark ward, in which something begins to reign which is not sleep, but merely a kind of nocturnal stupor.
The billiard-table has been pushed into a corner; it is loaded with an incoherent mass of linen, bottles, and articles of furniture. A smell of soup and excrements circulates between the stretchers, and seems to insult the slender onyx vases that surmount the cabinet.
And now, quickly! quickly! Let us escape on tiptoe into the open air.
The night is clear and cold, without a breath of wind: a vast block of transparent ice between the snow and the stars. Will it suffice to cleanse throat and lungs, nauseated by the close effluvium of suppurating wounds?