Anyone’s death always releases something like an aura of stupefaction, so difficult is it to grasp this irruption of nothingness and to believe that it has actually taken place.

Flaubert’s sentence treats death less as an event than as a cognitive shock. The “aura of stupefaction” names the stunned atmosphere that follows news of a death, when ordinary perception lags behind reality. Calling death an “irruption of nothingness” frames it as a rupture—an abrupt entry of absence into the world of presences—so radical that the mind resists assent. The line captures a modern, almost existential sense of bereavement: even when death is expected, it remains conceptually scandalous, because it forces us to imagine a person as suddenly non-being. The emphasis is not on grief’s emotion but on disbelief’s metaphysical difficulty.