“Is it not true, my well-beloved, is it not true that it would be well with us?  It is a soft bed, that bed of earth; no suffering can reach us there; the occupants of the neighboring tombs will not gossip about us; our bones will embrace in peace and without pride, for death is solace, and that which binds does not also separate.  Why should annihilation frighten thee, poor body, destined to corruption?  Every hour that strikes drags thee on to thy doom, every step breaks the round on which thou hast just rested; thou art nourished by the dead; the air of heaven weighs upon and crushes thee, the earth on which thou treadest attracts thee by the soles of thy feet.

“Down with thee!  Why art thou affrighted?  Dost thou tremble at a word?  Merely say:  ‘We will not live.’  Is not life a burden that we long to lay down?  Why hesitate when it is merely a question of a little sooner or a little later?  Matter is indestructible, and the physicists, we are told, grind to infinity the smallest speck of dust without being able to annihilate it.  If matter is the property of chance, what harm can it do to change its form since it can not cease to be matter?  Why should God care what form I have received and with what livery I invest my grief?  Suffering lives in my brain; it belongs to me, I kill it; but my bones do not belong to me and I return them to Him who lent them to me:  may some poet make a cup of my skull from which to drink his new wine!

“What reproach can I incur and what harm can that reproach do me?  What stern judge will tell me that I have done wrong?  What does he know about it?

“Was he such as I?  If every creature has his task to perform, and if it is a crime to shirk it, what culprits are the babes who die on the nurse’s breast!  Why should they be spared?  Who will be instructed by the lessons which are taught after death?  Must heaven be a desert in order that man may be punished for having lived?  Is it not enough to have lived?  I do not know who asked that question, unless it were Voltaire on his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of the helpless old atheist.

“But to what purpose?  Why so many struggles?  Who is there above us who delights in so much agony?  Who amuses himself and wiles away an idle hour watching this spectacle of creation, always renewed and always dying, seeing the work of man’s hands rising, the grass growing; looking upon the planting of the seed and the fall of the thunderbolt; beholding man walking about upon his earth until he meets the beckoning finger of death; counting tears and watching them dry upon the cheek of pain; noting the pure profile of love and the wrinkled face of age; seeing hands stretched up to him in supplication, bodies prostrate before him, and not a blade of wheat more in the harvest!