In the morning, when everything was done, I gave her a long last farewell kiss in her coffin. I bent over her, and as I lowered my head into the coffin I felt the lead buckle under my hands … The grave was too narrow, the coffin wouldn’t fit. They shook it, pulled it, turned it this way and that; they took a spade and crowbars, and finally a gravedigger trod on it—just above Caroline’s head—to force it down. I was standing at the side, holding my hat in my hand; I threw it down with a cry.

… I wanted to tell you all this, thinking it would give you pleasure. You are sufficiently intelligent, and love me enough, to understand that word ‘pleasure’, which would make the bourgeois laugh.

Flaubert, letter to Maxime DuCamp, March 1846

… The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

Antony and Cleopatra