Don’t we all of us slay each other, day in, day out, hour after hour, with our exquisite smiles and shattering indifference, our lavish displays of wealth that the more impoverished members of society can only lower their eyes before?

Perhaps he’ll just have to keep his friend inside him, like that unwavering A note that enables you to get your bearings?

The Narrator quite understands. He doesn’t like sham either, and affluence always has something sham about it. It’s always a violence done to the tender-hearted. The same is true of brilliant table talk: it, too – always – is an affront to the pure of heart, souls who have lost their way. An atmosphere of dignified, unassuming sorrow is the one

‘hardworking’? Among those on whom fate has not looked kindly, who don’t talk a lot of hot air and, in spite of it all, keep going? Faced with the spectacle of worldly success – and worldly success is always a spectacle – Fanny, despite her familiarity with the classics and her privileged childhood, shakes like a leaf. The dominant are far deadlier

It isn’t always the things you expect that comfort you.

Perhaps we all have lives the person closest to us knows nothing of? And perhaps this is what really attracts us to each other: the presence of this secret life which, from time to time, is revealed to us through a gleaming, narrow slit.

And should we catch a glimpse of them in the privacy of their own self (which is impossible without spying on them or rummaging through their papers) they are someone of whom we know strictly nothing.

She was like a horse in fetters, it was truly dreadful to behold: to be so full of life, yet bound up in chains. And for what? To what end? Merely to endure, to endure a little longer.

She also had in her, popping up from time to time, and always when you least expected it, the jovial young woman in the leopard-skin hat she would have been had certain hatches not got battened down one day, by accident, abruptly, as if by a gust of wind.