Study of the great malady of horror of home. Causes of the malady. Progressive worsening of the malady.
Indignation caused by universal conceit, in every class, in every being, in both sexes, at every age.
Man loves man so much that, when he flees the city, he still goes in search of the crowd, that is, to recreate the city in the country.
Durandeau’s discourse on the Japanese. (For my part, I am French above all.) The Japanese are monkeys; Darjon told me so.
Discourse by the doctor, Mathieu’s friend, on the art of not having children, on Moses, and on the immortality of the soul.
Art is a civilizing agent (Castagnary).
Picture of a sage and his family on the fifth floor, drinking café au lait.
Mr Nacquart the father and Mr Nacquart the son.
How Nacquart the son became a judge in the Court of Appeal.
On the French love of, and predilection for, military metaphors. Every metaphor here wears a moustache.
Militant literature.
Stay at the breach.
Carry the flag high.
Hold the flag high and firm.
Throw oneself into the fray.
One of the veterans. — All these glorious turns of phrase generally apply to pedants and tavern idlers.
A French metaphor.
Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin).
The militant press.
To add to the military metaphors:
Poets of combat.
Avant-garde writers.
This habitual use of military metaphors reveals minds that are not militant but made for discipline, that is, for conformity: minds born to be servants, Belgian minds, which can think only in company.
The taste for pleasure binds us to the present. Concern for our salvation holds us suspended from the future.
Someone who clings to pleasure, that is, to the present, strikes me as a man rolling down a slope who, trying to catch hold of the bushes, would tear them out and carry them down in his fall.
Above all, to be a great man and a saint for oneself.
On the people’s hatred of beauty. Examples: Jeanne and Mme Muller.
Politics. — In short, before history and before the French people, Napoleon III’s great glory will have been to prove that anyone at all can govern a great nation by seizing the telegraph and the National Printing Office.
Fools are those who believe that such things can be done without the people’s permission, — and those who believe that glory can rest only on virtue!
Dictators are the people’s servants, — nothing more, a damned role, moreover, and glory ⟨is⟩ the result of a mind’s adaptation to the nation’s stupidity.
What is love?
The need to get outside oneself.
Man is a worshipping animal.
To worship is to sacrifice oneself and to prostitute oneself.
Thus all love is prostitution.
[The most prostituted being is the being par excellence, God, since he is the supreme friend of every individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.
PRAYER
Do not punish me through my mother, and do not punish my mother because of me. — I commend to you the souls of my father and Mariette: — Give me the strength to do my duty immediately every day and thus become a hero and a saint.]
A chapter on indestructible, eternal, universal and ingenious human ferocity.
On the love of blood.
On the intoxication of blood.
On the intoxication of crowds.
On the intoxication of the man under torture (Damiens).