“Now, Mesnilgrand saw himself come to full maturity without the great military career that he had hoped for, his sword rusting in its scabbard, his feelings swelling up into the bitterest kind of rage. [...] An ingenious moralist, preoccupid by how illogical our destinies appear to be, once explained it by hypothesizing that men are like portrairs: the ones who have only their head and shoulders depicted seem larger than they could really have been in life, while others practically disappear, shrunken and reduced to looking like dwarves by the absurd size of their portrait's frame. [...] Back then, people thought he would either kill himself or go mad. He did not kill himself, and his mind stayed whole. He did not go mad. But then, that was because he was mad already, said the jokers—for there are always jokers. But although he did not kill himself—and, given his nature, his comrades chose not to ask him why he did not—he was not the kind of man to let his heart be eaten by a vulture without at least trying to break the vulture's beak.”