“We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us; each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt de trop in relation to the others. De trop: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plain trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself and overflowed.. – And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts-I, too, was de trop…. Even my death would have been de trop. De trop, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of the smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been de trop in the earth which would receive my bones, at last; cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been de trop: I was de trop for eternity.”
— Sartre, La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard. 1938