Flares. — I believe the infinite and mysterious charm that lies in contemplating a ship, and especially a ship in motion, comes, in the first case, from regularity and symmetry, which are among the human mind’s primary needs, as much as complexity and harmony; and, in the second, from the successive multiplication and generation of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the object’s real elements.

The poetic idea that emerges from this operation of movement in the lines is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and ambitions.

Civilized peoples, who always speak foolishly of Savages and Barbarians, soon, as d’Aurevilly says, you will no longer be worthy even of being idolaters.

Stoicism, a religion with only one sacrament: suicide!

Devise a scenario for a lyrical or fairy farce, for pantomime, and turn it into a serious novel. Immerse the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere—in the atmosphere of great days. Let it be something lulling—and even serene in passion. — Regions of pure Poetry.

Moved by the touch of these sensual pleasures that resembled memories, softened by the thought of an ill-spent past, of so many faults, so many quarrels, so many things to hide from one another, he began to weep; and his warm tears flowed, in the darkness, onto the bare shoulder of his dear and still alluring mistress. She shuddered; she too felt herself softened and stirred. The darkness reassured her vanity and her cold woman’s dandyism. These two fallen beings, still suffering from what remained of their nobility, spontaneously embraced, mingling, in the rain of their tears and kisses, the sorrows of their past with their very uncertain hopes for the future. It is likely that sensual pleasure was never so sweet to them as on that night of melancholy and charity—sensual pleasure saturated with pain and remorse.

Through the blackness of the night, he had looked back into the deep years, then thrown himself into the arms of his guilty lover, to find there the forgiveness he granted her.

Hugo often thinks of Prometheus. He sets an imaginary vulture upon a breast tormented only by vanity’s moxas. Then, as the hallucination grows more complex and varied, while following the progressive course described by physicians, he believes that, by a fiat of Providence, Saint Helena has taken Jersey’s place.

This man is so little elegiac, so little ethereal, that he would horrify even a notary.

Hugo, priesthood incarnate, always has his head bent—too far bent to see anything except his navel.

… What is not a priesthood today? Youth itself is a priesthood—so youth says.

And what is not a prayer? Sh... is a prayer, so the democrats say when they sh...

M. de Pontmartin—a man who always looks as though he has just arrived from his province…

Man—that is, each man—is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from universal abasement than from the establishment of a reasonable hierarchy.

The world will end. The only reason it might last is that it exists. How weak that reason is beside all those that predict the contrary, especially this one: What does the world have left to do beneath the sky? — For, supposing it continued to exist materially, would that be an existence worthy of the name and of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be reduced to the expedients and farcical disorder of the South American republics, that perhaps we shall even return to a savage state and go seeking our food, rifle in hand, through the grass-grown ruins of our civilization. No; for such adventures would still imply a certain vital energy, an echo of the earliest ages. A new example and new victims of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish through what we thought would keep us alive. Machinery will have so Americanized us, progress will have so thoroughly atrophied our whole spiritual part, that nothing in the utopians’ bloodthirsty, sacrilegious or unnatural fantasies will compare with its actual results. I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life. As for religion, I think it useless to speak of it or to look for its remains, since taking the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in such matters. Property had disappeared in principle with the abolition of primogeniture; but the time will come when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will tear the last morsel from those who will believe they have legitimately inherited from the revolutions. Even then, that would not be the supreme evil.

Human imagination can conceive, without much difficulty, republics or other communal States worthy of some glory, if they are led by sacred men, by certain aristocrats. But universal ruin, or universal progress—for I care little about the name—will not manifest itself particularly through political institutions. It will be through the degradation of hearts. Need I say that what little remains of politics will struggle painfully in the grip of general animality, and that rulers, to hold their positions and create a phantom of order, will be forced to resort to means that would make our present humanity shudder, hardened though it is? — Then the son will flee the family, not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not to seek heroic adventures, not to rescue a beauty imprisoned in a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to establish a business, to grow rich, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder and shareholder of a newspaper that will spread enlightenment and would make the Siècle of that time look like an agent of superstition. — Then the wandering women, the outcasts, those who have had a few lovers and are sometimes called Angels, because of, and in gratitude for, the heedlessness that shines like a chance light in their existence, logical as evil—then those women, I say, will be nothing but pitiless wisdom, wisdom that will condemn everything except money, everything, even the errors of the senses! Then whatever resembles virtue—what am I saying?—anything that is not ardor for Plutus will be considered immensely ridiculous. The courts, if justice can still exist in that fortunate age, will have citizens who do not know how to make a fortune declared legally incapable. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste other half, whose legitimacy is her poetry for you, henceforth bringing an irreproachable infamy within the law, vigilant and loving guardian of your safe, will be nothing but the perfect ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, with an infant’s nubility, will dream in her cradle that she is selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois—still less a poet than you are today—will find nothing to object to; you will regret nothing. For there are things in man that grow stronger and flourish as others become more delicate and diminish; and, thanks to the progress of those times, nothing will remain of your entrails but viscera! — Those times may be very near; who knows whether they have not already arrived, and whether the coarsening of our nature is not the sole obstacle preventing us from judging the surroundings in which we breathe?

As for me, I sometimes feel within myself the ridiculousness of a prophet, and I know I shall never find there a physician’s charity. Lost in this ugly world, jostled by the crowds, I am like a weary man whose eye sees behind him, in the deep years, only disillusionment and bitterness, and before him only a storm containing nothing new, neither lesson nor pain. On an evening when this man has stolen a few hours of pleasure from fate, lulled by his digestion, forgetful—as far as possible—of the past, content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with his composure and his dandyism, proud not to be as low as those passing by, he says to himself, contemplating his cigar’s smoke: ‘What do I care where these consciences are going?’

I believe I have drifted into what people in the trade call a digression. Yet I shall leave these pages—because I want to date my anger.