"Sir, it is Sunday."

from a review of Pages from the Goncourt Journals in the latest New York Review of Books:

The recurrent personalities of the Journal are among the finest comic characters in French literature: George Sand, the "ghostly automaton" who chain-smokes cigarettes and chain-writes novels ("One day she finished a novel at one o'clock in the morning. 'Good heavens,' she said, 'I've finished!' And she promptly started another"); Alexandre Dumas fils, the health-obsessed son of a famous father, who agonizes over half a sentence for a year, "and then his father arrives from Naples and says: 'Get me a cutlet and I'll finish your play for you,' writes the scenario, brings in a whore, borrows some money and goes off again"; Émile Zola, tormented by ambition and bored by his own interminable sequence of novels; Hippolyte Taine, the "pot-bellied clergyman" with a "horrifying" wife, "who looks like a diseased silkworm which a schoolboy has daubed with ink"; and the star of the earlier volumes, the exuberantly friendly Flaubert, who dreams of Babylonian excess and leads a monkish life at Croisset—"he had given instructions to his servant to speak to him only on Sundays, and then only in order to say: 'Sir, it is Sunday.'"