La mort d'Ivan Ilitch

A good-family bourgeois, Ivan Ilich is an intelligent and respectable man. Successfully successful, the magistrate leads a quiet life. But a deaf, unknown evil strikes him. The disease comes to disturb a life of pleasure and conventions. The slow and painful agony pushes Ivan Ilich into introspection and, at the moment of death, the mediocrity of his existence is his eye. Alone, he awaits death as a liberation. Published in 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilich describes the anguish of death at the dusk of a life "the simplest, most ordinary and also the most appalling one".