A Combien l’Amour revient ...

How much love returns to old people, by Honoré de Balzac.
Extract :
For the past eight days, Nucingen had been haggling over the delivery of the one he loved, almost every day, in the entresol of the rue Neuve Saint Marc. There throned Asia between the most beautiful finery arrived at this horrible phase where the dresses are not any more dresses and are not yet rags. The setting was in harmony with the figure that this woman formed, for these shops are one of the most sinister peculiarities of Paris. One sees there the cast-offs that Death has thrown there with his emaciated hand, and one then hears the death rattle of consumption under a shawl, as one guesses there the agony of misery under a dress laminated with gold. The atrocious debates between Luxury and Hunger are written there on light lace. We find there the physiognomy of a Queen under a feathered turban whose pose recalls and almost restores the absent figure. It is the hideous in the pretty! Juvenal's whip, waved by the official hands of the auctioneer, scatters the peeled muffs, the withered furs of the beleaguered Messalinas. It is a dunghill of flowers where here and there shine roses cut yesterday, worn one day, and on which an old woman always squats, the first cousin of usury, Occasion bald, toothless, and ready to sell the contents, she is so used to buying the container, the dress without the woman or the woman without the dress!..