burning sky

Finally, in reenacting what you have done and the roles you have played in your life

The heart-rending pain; the shame of later revealed motives,

And you once thought it was an act of kindness,

Now I realize that everything in the past was all evil

It's all about guilt for hurting someone else.

Then the praise of fools stings you, and the honor of the world defiles you.

Enraged souls go from wrong to wrong

unless rescued by fire, for like a dancer

You have to jump there to the beat.

— Eliot, "Little Gidding"

The crimson clouds began to dim, falling from the dark sky like clots of blood.The eerie light of the Eiffel Tower turned into black turbidity again.

Leaning on the railing on the bank of the Seine, time flew backwards in his mind.Looking through the dark green waves, under the silt of several centuries, there are thousands of pairs of dark and godless eyes. In 1794, the blood flowed from the eye sockets of these drowned people, and has since dissipated in this stretch of blue waves under.

Yes, the Eiffel Tower was built 100 years ago to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution. 200 years ago, blood flowed through the Place de la Concorde. Before that, it used to stand here with a different face... It turns out that everything has passed for so long.

Over the centuries, I have watched the demise of countless dynasties, the change of countless regimes/powers, and the bloody sky, which seems to be burning like dazzling and terrifying.

I would like to bury the past and exchange it for bright sorrow.

But why is it destined that I, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, will spend centuries alone in the gap between truth and falsehood, with nowhere to turn.

Note: At the peak of the French Revolution/Revolutionary Terror/Terror, thousands of royalists were collectively pushed into the river and drowned because the guillotine could not work, so it is said that countless eyes were seen from under the river.

Note: The references for this novel are: wikipedia, various domestic and foreign websites, Zhu Xueqin's "From Rousseau to Robespierre--The Fall of the Moral Utopia", Lin Da's "Take a Book to Paris", Ling Yongle's "La Watts, etc., and thanks to Eliot's "Four Quartets" for adding a lot of color to the novel.

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