Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Die, very good, but do not make others die. Suicides like the one which is about to take place here are sublime, but suicide is restricted, and does not allow of extension; and so soon as it affects your neighbors, suicide becomes murder.

Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour.

You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.

A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven; there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the conscience.

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.