Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.
It is through leisure that I have, in part, grown.
To my great detriment; for leisure without wealth increases debts and the humiliations that result from debts.
But to my great benefit, with regard to sensitivity, meditation and the capacity for dandyism and dilettantism.
Other men of letters are, for the most part, vile, thoroughly ignorant drudges.
The young girl of the publishers.
The young girl of the editors in chief.
The young girl, scarecrow, monster, murderer of art.
The young girl, what she is in reality.
A little fool and a little slut; the greatest imbecility united with the greatest depravity.
In the young girl there is all the abjectness of the street tough and the schoolboy.
Notice to non-communists:
Everything is held in common, even God.
The Frenchman is a farmyard animal so thoroughly domesticated that he dares not cross any fence. See his tastes in art and literature.
He is an animal of the Latin race; filth does not offend him in his home, and in literature he is an excrement eater. He is mad about excrement. Tavern literati call this Gallic wit.
Fine example of French baseness, of the nation that claims to be more independent than any other.
[Here this short item, cut from a newspaper, is pasted onto the manuscript:]
‘The following extract from M. de Vaulabelle’s fine book will suffice to give an idea of the impression Lavalette’s escape made on the least enlightened portion of the royalist party:
‘Royalist fury, at this time of the Second Restoration, went, so to speak, as far as madness. The young Joséphine de Lavalette was being educated in one of the principal convents of Paris (the Abbaye-au-Bois); she had left it only to come and embrace her father. When she returned after the escape and the very modest part she had played in it became known, an immense outcry arose against this child; the nuns and her companions avoided her, and a good number of parents declared that they would withdraw their daughters if she were kept there. They did not want, they said, to leave their children in contact with a young person who had behaved in such a way and set such an example. When Mme de Lavalette, six weeks later, regained her freedom, she was obliged to take her daughter back.’
Princes and generations. — It is equally unjust to attribute to reigning princes the merits and vices of the people they now govern.
These merits and vices are almost always, as statistics and logic could demonstrate, attributable to the atmosphere of the preceding government.
Louis XIV inherits the men of Louis XIII: glory. Napoleon I inherits the men of the Republic: glory. Louis-Philippe inherits the men of Charles X: glory. Napoleon III inherits the men of Louis-Philippe: dishonour.
It is always the preceding government that is responsible for the morals of the next, insofar as a government can be responsible for anything at all.
The abrupt breaks that circumstances make in reigns prevent this law from being absolutely exact in relation to time. One cannot mark exactly where an influence ends, but that influence will persist in the whole generation that underwent it in its youth.
On the hatred of the young for those who quote. The man who quotes is an enemy to them.
‘I would spell correctly even under the executioner’s hand.’
Théophile Gautier.
A fine picture to make: the literary rabble.
Do not forget a portrait of Forgues, the pirate, the buccaneer of letters.
An unshakeable taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which arises his horror of solitude. — He wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one, and therefore solitary.
Fame means remaining one and prostituting oneself in a particular way.
It is this horror of solitude, the need to forget one’s self in flesh outside oneself, that man nobly calls the need to love.
Two splendid religions, immortal on the walls, eternal obsessions of the People: a p... (the ancient phallus) and ‘Long live Barbès!’ or ‘Down with Philippe!’ or ‘Long live the Republic!’
Study, in all its forms, in the works of nature and in the works of man, the universal and eternal law of gradation, of step by step, of little by little, with progressively growing forces, as with compound interest in finance.
The same holds for artistic and literary skill; the same holds for the fluctuating treasury of sensual pleasure.
The throng of minor writers one sees at funerals, handing out handshakes and making sure the writer of newspaper columns remembers them.
Molière. — My opinion of Tartuffe is that it is a pamphlet, not a comedy. An atheist, if he is merely a well-bred man, will think, concerning this play, that certain grave questions should never be handed over to the rabble.
Glorify the worship of images (my great, my only, my first passion).
Glorify wandering and what may be called bohemianism. Worship of multiplied sensation expressing itself through music. Refer the matter to Liszt.
On the necessity of beating women.
One may punish what one loves. Children, for example. But this entails the pain of despising what one loves.
On cuckoldry and cuckolds.
The cuckold’s pain.
It springs from his pride, from false reasoning about honour and happiness, and from a love foolishly diverted from God to be bestowed on creatures.
It is always the worshipping animal choosing the wrong idol.
Analysis of insolent imbecility. Clément de Ris and Paul Pérignon.