A hunter fires his rifle in a forest, his prey falls, he rushes to seize it. His boot runs into an anthill two feet high, destroys the ants' habitation, scatters the ants and their eggs far and wide.... The most philosophical among those ants will never be able to comprehend that huge black appalling body: the hunter's boot, which has penetrated their abode with incredible speed, and which was preceded by a dreadful noise accompanied by a sheaf of reddish fire....

So life, death, eternity, are simple matters for anyone who has faculties huge enough to comprehend them....

A dayfly is born at nine in the morning, during the long summer days, to die at five in the evening; how could it understand the word "night"?

Give it five hours more; it will see and understand what night is.

Likewise, I shall die at twenty-three. Give me five more years of life, to live with Mme. de Rènal....

What madness to go on discussing these great questions!

One. I am as hypocritical as if there were someone here to listen to me.

Two. I am forgetting to live and to love, when I have so few days left to live.... Alas! Mme. de Rènal is absent; perhaps her husband will not let her come back to Besançon and go on disgracing herself.

That is what isolates me, and not the absence of a just, good, omnipotent God, who is not wicked and thirsty for vengeance.

Ah! if only He existed.... Alas! I would fall at his feet. I deserved to die, I would tell him; but, great God, good God, long-suffering God, give me back the one I love!

Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), The Red and the Black
Translated by Lloyd C. Parks
Translation copyright © 1970 by Lloyd C. Parks. All rights reserved.

Posted 2 March 1997

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