The Count of Monte Cristo

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Noirtier, for whom France was a vast chess-board, from which pawns,
rooks, knights, and queens were to disappear, so that the king was
checkmated--M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning 'poor M.
Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of the weakest
creature in the household, that is, his grandchild, Valentine; a dumb
and frozen carcass, in fact, living painlessly on, that time may be
given for his frame to decompose without his consciousness of its
decay."

"Alas, sir," said Monte Cristo "this spectacle is neither strange to
my eye nor my thought. I am something of a physician, and have, like
my fellows, sought more than once for the soul in living and in dead
matter; yet, like providence, it has remained invisible to my eyes,
although present to my heart. A hundred writers since Socrates, Seneca,
St. Augustine, and Gall, have made, in verse and prose, the comparison
you have made, and yet I can well understand that a father's sufferings
may effect great changes in the mind of a son. I will call on you,