To tell the truth, if I had been a stag or a Brazilian macaque, the question wouldn’t even have arisen: the first action of a male mammal when he conquers a female is to destroy all her previous offspring to ensure the pre-eminence of his genotype. This attitude had been maintained for a long time in the first human populations.

you really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning, ineluctably, with the odd mistake, a few errors when there’s sickness in the mix,

An atmosphere of general catastrophe always alleviates individual catastrophe – that’s probably why suicides are so rare in wartime

since it’s true that in the middle of our own dramas we are reassured by the existence of others that we have been spared.

the gentle mooing of the cows, the not entirely disagreeable smell of dung, they all briefly gave me the sense of – I wouldn’t say of having a place in the world, let’s not overstate the case – but of belonging to a kind of organic continuum, of animal regrouping.

I hadn’t been formatted for such a proposition, it wasn’t part of my software; I was a modern man, and for me, like for all of my contemporaries, a woman’s professional career was something that had to be respected above all else – it was the absolute criterion, it meant overtaking barbarism and leaving the Middle Ages.

our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut. That’s probably also why the friendships of our youth, the ones we make during our time as students and which are our only true friendships, never

it isn’t the future but the past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you.

The most touching aspect of this was probably his personal attitude towards death: separated from the Christian faith by his gruesomely materialistic medical studies, confronted all through his life with cruel and repeated loss – including the loss of his own sons, who were sacrificed to England’s warlike plans – his last resort was to turn towards