These letters to write exhaust me, wear out my patience; they won’t let me work. . . . No friendship matters in such a case; I would throw out the best friend. . . . But I don’t. I always write eventually; to have peace, peace with myself; for, so long as I don’t write, I reproach myself for not writing. The trouble is that when you write immediately, the one on the other end answers; and yet, until he has answered, I wait for his letter.

Every time I meet Blanche, I feel immediately that I am not wearing the proper necktie, that my hat has not been brushed, and that my cuffs are soiled. This bothers me much more than what I am about to say to him.

Have I already noted somewhere the conversation he had with Régnier? I was there and I heard this:

“Oh, my friend, what stunning trousers you have on! Where did you get them?”

And Régnier, considerably irritated, replied with dignity and roguishness:

“From the cleaner’s.”

A dull torpor of the mind has made me vegetate for the last three years. Perhaps, busy in my garden, in daily contact with the plants, I have taken on their habits. The least sentence costs me an effort; talking, moreover, is almost as painful as writing. And I must admit too that I was becoming difficult: at the least suspicion of a thought, some cantankerous critic, always hiding deep in my mind, would rise up to ask: “Are you sure that it’s worth the trouble to . . . ?” And since, the trouble was enormous, the thought immediately withdrew.

The trip to Germany last summer shook off my apathy somewhat; but as soon as I got back here, it took a deeper hold on me. I accused the weather (it rained incessantly that year); I accused the air of Cuverville (and I still fear that it exerts a soporific influence over me): I accused my routine (indeed, it was very bad; I never left the garden, where, for hours on end, I would contemplate the plants one after another)

The first really hot evening, after a stifling and radiant day. If I had some book under way, I should write this evening its most beautiful pages. My brain is lucid, not too gay, my flesh is at rest, my spirit staunch. This evening I should be a wonderful lover, and I cannot think of Gérard without pity. I should like not to have met M. before yesterday and not to have spoken to him until today. . . .

If I threw myself from my balcony tonight, I should do so saying: “It’s simpler.”

A few years ago I should have been utterly demoralized to have read, amorphous as they still are, these pages that I thought to be already perfect (or almost). Nothing is created without a divine patience.

Everything in him improves when better known, when explained—even if by himself.

I try to consider patience as my greatest quality; in any case it is the one I must above all encourage in me. I write “patience”; I ought to say “obstinacy”; but what is really needed is a supple obstinacy.