four o’clock
When one remembers all this , suicide looms large . Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man to Paris , God only knows what may intervene ; what contending ideas have striven within the soul ; what poems have been set aside ; what moans and what despair have been repressed ; what abortive masterpieces and vain endeavors ! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow . Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas of literature that can compare with this paragraph : `` Yesterday , at four o'clock , a young woman threw herself into the Seine from the Pont des Arts . '' Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase ; so must even that old frontispiece , _ The Lamentations of the glorious king of Kaernavan , put in prison by his children _ , the sole remaining fragment of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal -- the same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family . The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these , which passed in fragments through his mind , like tattered flags fluttering above the combat . If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and of memory , to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among the green thickets , a revulsion came over him , life struggled against the oppressive thought of suicide , and his eyes rose to the sky : gray clouds , melancholy gusts of the wind , the stormy atmosphere , all decreed that he should die .