And whatever you suspect, no 'lovely lady' comes to see me. Lovely ladies have occupied my mind a good deal, but have taken up very little of my time... I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being, and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink, and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.

From a letter from Gustave Flaubert to George Sand, 1867