Malignant Gabriel Quotes

Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.

For the wine of Clochemerle is at once exquisite and treacherous; it charms first the nose, then the palate, finally the entire man. Mark well that if it makes a man drunk it does not do so malignantly. It produces an enchanting light-heartedness, an intellectual sparkle which liberates the drinker from the constraints and conventions which bind him in his daily life.

It was never established with any certainty if the death of his wife eight months after the wedding was caused by a malignant fever or a domestic accident. For him it meant his birth into history, for he had been a rich young gentleman from the colonies, dazzled by mundane pleasures and without the slightest interest in politics, but at that moment he became, with no transition, the man he would be for the rest of his life. He never spoke of his dead wife again, he never recalled her, he never tried to replace her. Almost every night of his life he dreamed about the house at San Mateo, and he often dreamed of his father and mother, his brother and sisters, but he never dreamed about her, for he had buried her at the bottom of a watertight oblivion as a brutal means of living without her.