Guy de Maupassant: “A curtain of glistening snowflakes descended toward the earth…”

A curtain of glistening snowflakes descended toward the earth, veiling every human form and covering inanimate objects with an icy fleece. In the intense stillness of the town, plunged in the deep repose of winter, no sound was audible save that vague, indefinable, fluttering whisper of the falling snow, felt rather than heard, the mingling of airy atoms, which seemed to fill all space and envelop the whole world.

—Boule de Suif (1880), translated by Marjorie Laurie