Notre Coeur; Or, a Woman's Pastime: A Novel

“Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.””

— Guy de Maupassant

“By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.””

— Guy de Maupassant

“Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man's unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness.””

— Guy de Maupassant

“I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that's my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness. But this woman has taken possession of me in spite of myself, in spite of my fear and my knowledge of her; and she possesses me as if she had plucked out, one after the other, my every last aspiration.””

— Guy de Maupassant

“Every authentically loved being is a kind of god.””

— Guy de Maupassant

“At times it seemed to her that other people's hearts must have arms like their bodies, loving arms extended to clasp and hold”

— Guy de Maupassant

“Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves.””

— Guy de Maupassant