Claude Aveline's anthology, Les Mots de la fin. I found Alfred Le Poittevin's last words especially moving in their simplicity: "Close the window, it's too beautiful." In their brevity, they express an entire hymn that is given back to life by a dying man; they cannot be objected to. What was there beyond the window? A tree, the curve of a hill, a bit of sky, a few clouds, the smells of the earth, birds singing? Can a dying man, you ask, really be wounded by so little? Yet it is such things that most surely sustained us; we were nourished by them. Even if we were unaware of it. They form the very framework of life. Le Poittevin was not mistaken. As the separation was about to be accomplished, the window indeed needed to be closed. Ears and eyes were trained elsewhere: it was no longer possible to let earthly echoes enter.
Pierre-Albert Jourdan,
Straw Sandals: Selected Prose and Poetry, pg. 255
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