Old age and care

The last line but one is la solitude, and it marks a place where English is the richer language, which does not happen often on these pages. English keeps two nouns for being on your own and they pull in opposite directions. « Solitude » is the welcome one: it is chosen, it is quiet, it is what a writer goes off to find. « Loneliness » is the unwelcome one: nobody chooses it, and it is the word that appears in health reports and on helpline posters. The split exists because the two arrived from different places. « Solitude » came from Latin by way of French, while « loneliness » was built at home on « lonely », itself from « alone ». French never made that second word. La solitude covers the whole range, and only the sentence around it says which half is meant: la solitude pèse plus que la maladie is plainly the painful sense, while elle apprécie la solitude is the peaceful one. When a French report has to be unambiguous it reaches instead for l’isolement, the countable fact of having no visitors, and leaves la solitude to the feeling.