Explore "Under the Yoke" by Guy de Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As he was a man of quiet and regular habits, and of a simple and affectionate disposition, and had nothing to disturb the even tenor of his life, Monsieur de Loubancourt suffered more than most men do from his widowerhood. He regretted his lost happiness, was angry with fate, which separated united couples so brutally, and which made choice of a tranquil existence, whose sleepy quietude had not hitherto been troubled by any cares or chimeras, in order to rob it of its happiness.
Had he been younger, he might, perhaps, have been tempted to form a new line, to fill up the vacant place, and to marry again. But when a man is nearly sixty, such ideas make people laugh, for they have something ridiculous and insane about them; and so he dragged on his dull and weary existence, escaped from all those familiar objects which constantly recalled the past to him, and went from hotel to hotel without taking an interest in anything, without becoming intimate with anyone, even temporarily; inconsolable, silent, almost enigmatical, and looking funereal in his eternal black clothes.