She’s too nervous to bring herself within range of the mirror right away. A sidelong peek from a sharp angle shows only a strip of landscape beyond the balcony and a little of the room. She lacks the final bit of courage for the real test. Won’t she look even more ridiculous in the borrowed dress, won’t everyone, won’t she herself see the fraud for

And 1919—twenty-one. The war has in fact ended, but poverty has not. It only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances, crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry, and bold, and eating what’s left in the gutters of the war. An entire win

She murmurs a quick embarrassed hello as she passes each pair of knees, as if this courtesy might excuse her presence. But no one answers. She must have failed the sixteen inspections, or else the passengers, Romanian aristocrats speaking a harsh, vehement French, are having such a good time that they haven’t noticed the slender specter of poverty

Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete. No more struggling, no more striving, that’s the main thing! Breathe calmly, daydream quietly, do your work, water the flowers in the window, ask not, want not. No more asking for anything, nothing new, nothi

1916: She’s eighteen. There’s a new catchphrase in the household, used constantly: too expensive. Her mother, her father, her sister, her sister-in-law escape from their troubles into the smaller-scale misery of the bills, from morning until night they reckon up their poor daily life aloud. Meat, too expensive, butter, too expensive, a pair of shoe

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

Nothing leaves this realm of the Treasury, nothing is added to it, life goes on here without fading or flowering, or rather death never ends. The many kinds of objects differ only in their rhythm of attrition and renewal, not in their fate. A pencil lasts a week; then it has run its course and is replaced by an identical new one. A postal service m

But who dares to approach a desk clerk in the high season, this luxury-liner captain standing at the command behind his desk, steadfastly holding his course amid a storm of problems. A dozen guests wait shoulder to shoulder before him as he writes notes with his right hand and fires off bellhops like arrows with every look and nod while at the same

Christine flushes with mortification, noticing for the first time that her seedy little straw suitcase is swinging with telltale lightness in her hand, while in front of all the other cars stand spanking-new and metallically gleaming tank turrets of wardrobe trunks, seemingly straight from the store window, splendid towers among the colorful cubes