Explore "Claude's Confession" by Émile Zola on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You complain of my silence; you are uneasy, and ask me what new sorrows have made the pen fall from my fingers.
Brothers, my new sorrows are caused by the fact that our ridiculous fancies of childhood are being dissipated one by one. This adieu to early hopes has, in its salutary harshness, the most profound bitterness. I feel myself becoming a man; I weep over my departing weaknesses, taking, at the same time, a great pride in the strength I am acquiring.