“You can ask me if I am as fond of life as ever: I must own to you that I experience mortifications, and severe ones too; but I am still unhappy at the thought of death: I consider it so great a misfortune to see the termination of all my pursuits that I should desire nothing better, if it were practicable, than to begin life again. I find myself engaged in a scene of confusion and trouble: I was embarked in life without my own consent, and know I must leave it again: that distracts me; for how shall I leave it? in what manner? by what door? at what time? in what disposition? Am I to suffer a thousand pains and torments that will make me die in a state of despair? Shall I lose my senses? Am I to die by some sudden accident? How shall I stand with God? What shall I have to offer to him? Will fear and necessity make my peace with him? Shall I have no other sentiment but that of fear? What have I to hope? Am I worthy of heaven? or have I deserved the torments of hell? Dreadful alternative! Alarming uncertainty! Can there be greater madness than to place our eternal salvation in uncertainty? Yet what is more natural, or can be more easily accounted for, than the foolish manner in which I have spent my life? I am frequently buried in thoughts of this nature, and then death appears so dreadful to me that I hate life more for leading me to it than I do for all the thorns that are strewed in its way. You will ask me, then, if I would wish to live forever? Far from it: but if I had been consulted, I would very gladly have died in my nurse’s arms; it would have spared me many vexations, and would have ensured heaven to me at a very easy rate; but let us talk of something else.”

Just the same it takes a certain dose of mysticism—or of something—to go on speaking, writing, when you know that you are absolutely not being listened to.

The pleasure of corrupting is one of those which have been least examined; this is true likewise of everything we begin by stigmatizing.

Although he is too taciturn, I like traveling with Fabrice. He says, and I believe him, that at forty-eight he feels infinitely younger than he was at twenty. He enjoys that rare faculty of starting off anew at each turning-point in his life and of remaining faithful to himself by never resembling anything less than he does himself.

Today when he is traveling first-class (this hadn’t happened to him for some time now), in new clothes of an unaccustomed cut and a hat that is wonderfully becoming, he is amazed when he encounters himself in the mirror, and he charms himself. He says to himself: “New creature, today I can refuse you nothing!” 

Today glorious weather. My inner sky is even more radiant; a vast joy softens and exalts me.

I have lived all the time of late (and, altogether, since 5 May) my head swimming with happiness; whence the long empty space in this notebook. It reflects only my clouds.

I am no longer mistaken about it: Michel loves me not for so much for what I am as for what I allow him to be. Why should I ask for more? Never have I enjoyed life more, nor has the savor of life seemed more delicious to me. 

“Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as for what they keep us from doing.” It’s a pity, but I shall succeed.

Examined with Em. the accounts of which she has just finished making the statement. The item Gifts absorbs about a quarter of the annual expenditures (which, moreover, considerably exceed the “income”). Happy to see Em. approve that expenditure as much as I. I know that if she let herself go, she would give even more—even to the point of depriving herself completely. Oh! I should like to succeed in giving still more. I should like to succeed in giving everything away, to enjoy only what I gave or what I received from others.

Nothing is more amorphous than his book; it is a Kugelhupf in which you sometimes encounter a good raisin.

You meditate for months; in you an idea becomes flesh; it palpitates, it lives, you caress it; you adopt it intimately; you know its contours, its limits; its deficiencies, its reliefs, its recesses; at once its genealogy and its descendants (?). As soon as you present in public some exposé of this prolonged meditation, immediately a critic rises up to declare in peremptory fashion that you know nothing about it, and he does so in the name of common sense, that is to say of the most general opinion, that is to say the most conventional—to get away from which your entire effort tended.

If only, instead of getting angry, people tried to find out what is being discussed. Before discussing, one ought always to define. Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

“infinitely respectful of the sensitivity of others.”

One might say that there are two kinds of attention: one intense, and the other half listless and discursive; it is the latter that one is most inclined to lend; I really believe that most people are capable of the former kind only in case of danger and when it can serve as a warning. But, not having any gift whatsoever at telling stories, when I begin to tell a story aloud I am always afraid that it will be too long and that people will not listen to the end; I have often had even this mortifying experience (if, suddenly, I had to cut my story in the middle) of waiting in vain for a voice to say: “And so? . . .”

And perhaps indeed the lack of confidence that results from this, that fear of not being able to retain the reader’s attention (even much more than my “impatience,” as has been said), is the cause of that contraction or shrinking of the end of my books.—Just a moment more, gentlemen, and I shall have finished.

It is because I do not count on that prolonged attention, the second kind, that I appeal to the first kind, intense attention, infinitely rarer, harder to obtain, and granted more sparingly—but without which one cannot penetrate my writings.