"This work contains two long novellas, The Deadline and The Luxury of Others, followed by three shorter ones under the title Children's Hearts. The psychology of the 1880s lies in a spirit of contradiction. A supreme paradox between a life of physical and moral depravity, of cheerful skepticism, and a—repressible—need for certainty.
In this book, Paul Bourget, while speaking of one of his characters whose dearest wish is to be a writer, nuanced in the course of one of his portraits the image, all in all too romantic or too naive, of the artist.
At that point in the novella, he announces Eugène Corbières's decision to pursue a career as a doctor: "What decided me to take this path, it may seem strange to you, is the need for certainty. My personal taste would have drawn me toward more abstract studies. I would have entered the École Normale to study metaphysics, had I not read Kant and also Taine's On Intelligence. It seemed to me that the object of philosophical sciences is all too dubious. My own mind is as if hungry and thirsty for something positive, something indisputable."
