“The poison that the pages of my books exude fills me with fear,” wrote Marcel Jouandeau. In “Reflections on Life and Happiness,” published two years after “Reflections on Old Age and Death,” the 70-year-old writer explains how he, a Catholic and homosexual married to a vixen, learned to ignore adversity and human baseness, maintain a good mood and serenity, enjoying love, the object of which may be God, a well-tended garden, a seductive young man or an affectionate cat.

The more I look around me, the more often I think that the only wisdom in this world is to smile above all the disgusting and terrible things that you encounter in it every day.

Even if everything collapses around me, no one and nothing can do anything with my happiness, which I created for myself from life and death.

< p>Can a person, whose birth is only an implicit consequence of a mad act, often performed in intoxication, the result of an eruption of bodily fluid, not much different from urination, be anything other than a clot of flesh, condemned to inevitable decay? It is a true miracle that there is room for a soul in this body, no matter how small it may be!