I am well aware that one eventually finds beauty in what one has decided to consider beautiful. But in this case I do not think I am taken in, however subtle may be the debate between my will and my sincerity. Obviously nothing comes up to that immediate and irresistible emotion that makes you kneel panting before certain works of which the echo was latent in you; but there are acquired admirations, sometimes slowly and patiently acquired, which have their value too, and I am not quite sure if they are not even of greater advantage and better educative value for our whole being than the former.

How could complete frankness with you have been possible, since it implied the confession of what I knew you to consider abominable, and I not? since you considered abominable a part of me that I neither could nor would sacrifice?

That self-indulgence to which love invites us, drawing from us not the best but what is most likely to please the other; you do not so much raise him as he debases you. The levelling process is of necessity effected at the expense of the superior one.

I do not believe my joy has ever been deeper or keener. The air has never been softer and I have never breathed it more lovingly. My subtly active mind, beclouded by no worry, smiles at the humblest and pleasantest thought, as my flesh does at the azure, at the sun, and my heart at everything that lives. I did not feel any younger at twenty; and I am better aware of the value of the moment. I was more tormented by desires, by imperious demands. To my excesses at Calvi I owe a great calm. My glances are disinterested and the mirror of my mind is comparable to the surface of an unruffled lake on which all the reflections round about come voluptuously, but very purely, to take their place.

Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live — that we think is left us to live.

Some people would be sufficiently tender-hearted, but they lack imagination to the point of not being able to imagine, even weakly, the sufferings of those who are not close to them. The far-away ceases to seem quite real to them and they read descriptions of the imprisonment and brutalities suffered by the ‘suspect’ or ‘unorthodox’ professors in Poland, etc., etc, in the same spirit as tales of horrors of past ages. It does not touch them. A clever novelist would be able to move them more. In that sympathy for imaginary misfortunes there is a certain flattering self-indulgence; the knowledge of real sufferings only embarrasses. One things: What do you expect me to do about it? And, in the certainty of one’s inability to help, each one finds permission to sit back and do nothing.

As for feeling, through their very opinions, somewhat bound up with the oppressors and torturers, this never occurs to them. Obviously they feel and tell themselves that if they lived in the countries where such abominations take place, they would be on the right side. And isn’t it because I tell myself that I should be on the other side that these stories move me to such a degree? Feeling on the side of those who are being oppressed is a part of my optimism, and I know that if I endured their sufferings with them, my optimism would not be stifled. It is not at the mercy of constraints. Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

‘When I listen only to myself, I do wonders.’

‘With talent you do what you will; when you have genius, you do what you can.’ I have forgotten whose is this wonderful remark (Ingres?).