“Paris is becoming fantastic. Those buses without horses . . . You seem to be living in the land of shades. And this thought comes back to me: ‘Aren’t we all dead without knowing it?’ In these sounds, reflections, in this mist, you walk in anxiety, less with the fear of being run over than with the fear of no longer being alive. The impression of being in an immense cave, and your head in a pulp from the noise.”

(Jules Renard, December 1905, p. 190 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)