Yesterday I went back to a village two hours from here that I had visited eleven years ago with good old Orlowski.
Nothing had changed about the houses, or the cliff, or the boats. The women at the washing trough were kneeling in the same position, in the same numbers, and beating their dirty linen in the same blue water.
It was raining a little, like the last time.
It seems, at certain moments, as though the universe has stopped moving, as though everything has turned to stone, and only we are still alive.
How insolent nature is!
"The Washerwomen", story from Flaubert