These provinces of the phony war were habitable, even comfortable, provided you lived in them as if the air’s oxygen content were lowered, as if the light had imperceptibly dimmed: it was a world where there was no longer any good news: you survived by ignoring all extremities, concealed by guilty stratagems that shifted with every wind, from minute to minute, at the thought of what might happen; a world, in fact, of diseases that were painless but annoyingly prone to take a turn for the worse—a world of prognosis reserved.

Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, loc. 138