"the village...fell sorely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants "
"the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral"
"the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and maiden"
"Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave...and she herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit"
"Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his vast domain"
"The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality"
"nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition"
"Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light"
"so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended"
"scarcely incapable of moving"
"This place is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one companion, alas, she cannot speak"
"Often I am so silent that I think I, too, will soon forget how to do so and nobody here will ever talk any more"
"a ventriloquist's doll...ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control"
"it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it"
"She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself...she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death"
"The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions"
"pale as a plant that never sees the light"
"There is no room in her drama for improvisation"
"she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape"
"In her dream, she would like to be human"
"constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible"
"her horrible reluctance for the role"
"she loathes the food she eats"
"now, standing before the door of time-eroded oak...he knew it was too late to turn back"
"the eerie silence, the clammy chill of the place"
"I was only an invention of darkness"
"he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment at once...Next day, his regiment embarked for France"