There is no art except on a human scale. The instrument that allows man to go beyond his measure, to exceed his natural agility, escapes the conditions of the work of art. O light feet of Achilles! you are not scorned with impunity. Yes, the work of art was easy in a time when Pegasus of the ideal flight alone outdistanced the speedy son of Peleus. There can be no question of art as soon as the idea of establishing a record enters in. 

Locating the idea of perfection, not in equilibrium and the middle path, but in the extreme and exaggeration is perhaps what will most set off our period and distinguish it most annoyingly. 

To succeed on this plane, one must agree never to be embarrassed by anything. 

To reach what is going to serve me as a room I am told to cross through the kitchen, then a sort of dark storeroom; on the way I can clearly make out, by the light of my candle, a heap of newly washed laundry, but not the handles of the wheelbarrow on which it rests. I bump into them, scattering on the floor my night things, my light, and myself stretched out full length. For lack of witnesses, forced to laugh myself, in the dark, while rubbing my bruises.

For some time now I have been thinking only of a bath. 

Sunday to Monday: night spent at the baths of San Vicente. 

The moon, by some wonderful mystery, has been full for four or five nights now. My room, at the end of the hotel, overhangs the stream at a great height, and through the branches a little upstream i can just make out the sparkling of the water; not another sound but that of the rushing water. How slowly the night flows on! Anything that fell from the balcony would hardly be heard in its fall. Oh, to remain here, drunken and naked under the moon, with no other concern than to sleep off the heat of the day! It is so beautiful that the silence of the night birds is incomprehensible; it is amazing; everything seems to be waiting. . . . 

Lunched with Barrès (at Blanche’s). Great anxiety about the figure he cuts; he knows how to maintain silence in order to say nothing but important things. He has changed greatly since almost ten years ago when I last saw him; but he has kept his very active charm, through constantly holding back and knowing how to keep his reserve. What prudence! What economy! He is not a great intelligence, not a “great man,” but clever, using everything in him until he achieves the appearance of genius. Especially using circumstances, and knowing how to take advantage of what he has, to the point of hiding what he lacks. 

Les Caves. Necessity of drawing the naked form under the clothing in the manner of David, and of knowing about my characters even the things I am not going to use—or at least that are not to appear on the outside.

(Education through one’s enemies.)

It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself. 

All the causes of ruin are in us; but artificially dominated: culture.

I grieve to think that, later on, my weakened memory will be unable to offer me my sensation of today, however lively, which, losing all sharpness of outline, all accent, will merely seem to me like one of those medals o which the effigy has been effaced, alas, now blurred like any other medal that one can guess to have been precious only by the luster of the worn metal. 

Later on, taking this perfumed memory in my hand, pressing it affectionately against my lips, I shall think:

What was it? I no longer see it very clearly. The name of that child? Shall I get it mixed, alas, with so many others? The day was delightfully radiant; the water in the saqiyas, I remember, charming. I should like to define the line of the young body and again find it adorable.

insubordination with regard to the rules comes from an unintelligent subordination to realism

There is no greater cry of passion than this: 

NOVEL

The Santa Margherita hotel-keeper (a lawyer, it seems), Milanese, short, and with a beard pointing forward, bright and excessively amiable, serves at table himself; and since he is aided only by a single servant-girl (Austrian but Irrendentist), whereas there are twenty of us guests, he hustles about, jumps from one end of the dining-room to the other, urges me to have a second helping of a poor dish of which there is too much: “Help yourself again; it’s very light!” says to me as he rushes by: “It’s not quantity we lack . . .” flies off to give bread to a neighbor, then, on his way by again, finishes the sentence “. . . it’s service.” The table wine being almost undrinkable, I order a bottle of Barbera; nothing out of the ordinary, but he serves it wrapped in a table-napkin. That is the key to his character (worth examining what this might produce in the serious circumstances of life). 

The 15th of August, a holiday, when we were too numerous in the little dining-room, when the lunch didn’t begin until one o’clock, and when the “service” lost its head, the main course was a strange strew of bones, which he passed me, gallantly leaning over me and whispering very quickly, like a secret: “Knuckle of veal à la milanaise” What is called ossa bucca in Italian.”

This morning, while I am writing this: “A rather delicate little dish: red mullet with tomato sauce. Do you like it? This is French cooking, nothing to do with Italy.” All this said very rapidly and confiedentially.

A little later: 

“It’s not for me to offer you sweets . . . but if you like them . . . Do you like this?

“I don’t know; what is it?”

“The most original and at the same time the commenest thing in the world: custard.”

And he pours into my plate a sort of inedible paste.

“Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.” (Balzac.)

“That ambitious woman [Cornelia] had early prorepared for her sons all the instruments of tyranny: eloquence, in which they surpassed all the men of their time; gallantry: Tiberius was the first to climb the walls of Carthage; honesty itself; for such ambitions could not stop at avarice. The Stoics who raised the two children, as they had raised Cleomenes, the reformer of Sparta, inculcated in them that policy of leveling which serves tyranny so well, and the classic fables of the equality of wealth under Romulus and under Lycurgus.” (Michelet: Roman History, Vol. II, p. 162.)

In order to be more economical of it, I shall note in minute detail the manner in which I spend my time.

Seven thirty: bath, reading of Souday’s article on A. S.

Eighty thirty to nine: breakfast.

Nine o’clock: piano (first Bach-Liszt Prelude for organ).

Practice interrupted by the arrival of Dr. D. to dress Em.’s arm.

Ten to eleven: letters to Rilke and Eugène Rouart.

Eleven o’clock to twelve: walk, then cleaning up my notes on The Possessed.

Lunch.

One o’clock to two: practice at the piano.

Two to three: reading of Clayhanger, then intense fatigue and frightful let-down. I am going to sleep from three to four.

Through a desire and a need to attach myself to something solid, I am tying myself to the translation of Hebbel’s letters (those dated from France). I find both hard work and great interest in it, so that I continue this work until dinner time. 

With all my heart and all my soul I listen to this call of virtue.

I am writing seated on a bench in the Bois; the weather was radiant this morning; this is the secret of my happiness. But already the sky is clouding over again; I need Apollo; I must set out.

How hard is it for me to remember what I have done since Wednesday! 

Let’s try:

Paul Claudel is more massive, wider than ever; he looks as if he were seen is a distorting mirror; no neck, no forehead; he looks like a power-hammer. 

Certainly in my little book on Wilde I was not altogether just to his work and turned up my nose at it too readily—I mean before having known it sufficiently. As I think it over I wonder at the good grace with which Wilde listened to me when, in Algiers, I criticized his plays (very impertinently it seems to me today). No impatience in the tone of his reply, and not even a protest; it was then that he was led to say to me, almost as an excuse, that extraordinary sentence which I quoted and which has since been quoted everywhere: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” I should be interested to know if he ever said that sentence to anyone else but me.

At the time he used to repeat to himself, not without anguish, that the last act would perhaps not be a comedy ending and that life would fail him, not even all at once in screams of tears, which still involve a sort of glory and solemnity, but slowly in silence. 

He felt all his faculties weakening and wildly regretted all the joys and all the beauty of life that he had not hugged to his flesh and to his heart.