THE KILL (EMILE ZOLA, 1871)

'Like Paris itself, he had enjoyed a rapid transformation, a time of feverish pleasure and blind expenditure. And like the city he now found himself faced with a formidable deficit, which had to be paid off in secret, for he would not hear of sobriety, economy, and a calm, bourgeois existence. He preferred to hold onto the pointless luxury and actual misery of the boulevards from which he drew each morning the colossal fortune that he consumed by night. As he moved from adventure to adventure, all that he had left was the gilded façade without the capital to back it up'.

And none of us have the speculative capital inside us the way that the bourgeoisie create it, wield it and use it, we who always will fall at the back breaker of Progress...