Like everyone else, of course, I’d spent years, decades, hearing people talk about these things. The expression “Après moi le déluge” has been attributed alternately to Louis XV or to his mistress Madame de Pompadour. It pretty much summarized my own state of mind, but now, for the first time, I had a troubling thought: What if the deluge came before I died? Obviously, it’s not as if I expected my last years to be happy. There was no reason that I should be spared from grief, illness, or suffering. But until now I had always hoped to depart this world without undue violence.
