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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

ANNÉES 1777-1778

No individual date printed

The pain of seeing another treated better than oneself is not always jealousy.

No individual date printed

I would not counsel anyone who wishes to know man to be either foolish or wise while he is young: let him give himself free rein and examine himself.

No individual date printed

There are three things in my country that time alone makes white: flax, hemp, and hair.

For five years, every morning, the young solitary had recognized a young girl on the distant summit of the Arzéem by her garment of white linen.

Eyes accustomed to great distances see far: and a man’s gaze is keener when he looks at a woman.

There are three miles between the Arzéem and the monastery. The monastery stood on the tip of a hill. One still climbs to it by thirty paths, monuments to a hundred thousand storms. All have been hollowed out by ravines; it is the bed of the torrents where man sets his foot as soon as the torrents have passed, flowing from the heights of heaven onto the hill, from the hill into the plain, and from the plain into the Avezer and from the Avezer into the ocean.

O you whom I am about to celebrate, whose very names I do not know, I shall give you none, young lovers! Who could bear to have her beloved’s name changed, and who could bear to have his beloved’s name changed?

Let us have this pity for the dead: to do nothing that might have grieved them had they been able to foresee it.

A thousand times I was told this story in my childhood; but never did the married women or their mothers or their venerable grandmothers (for these tales were the tales of women; young girls never told tales in my native country, and men never told any like them), never, I say, did any of them give the two lovers names.

S2.Source editor’s annotationExactly the same handwriting and the same color of ink as the thought dated 1774.

S3.Source editor’s annotationIn 1776 Joubert has left the Doctrinaires and is in Montignac. No leaf of his exists bearing a date from these years. I assign to this period the sketch of a short tale of which we have only the opening lines. Decisive arguments are lacking to prove that these leaves really are of this date. But I seem to find signs of youth here. Then the landscape is that of Montignac, the Arzème, and the Vézère. The tone of the sentences also seems to me to correspond to the kind of tenderness a sensitive soul feels on returning home, within its native horizon, which it discovers through absence and return. Finally, the pen’s nonchalance and slow dexterity are indeed those of someone who, after a period of work, has for some time ceased writing. Besides, I admit that none of my reasons is proof.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThe same leaf on which the first part of this tale is written contains a series of notes Joubert took while reading Hobbes’s Treatise of Human Nature. But these are only short extracts, to which he added no personal reflections.

T6.The story’s placement in 1777–1778 is expressly conjectural in Beaunier’s note. The two questions name a male beloved (amant), then a female beloved (amante); her and his follow the two lovers in the narrative context, while French son alone does not identify the possessor’s gender. Arzéem and Avezer retain Joubert’s printed forms; the source editor uses Arzème and Vézère in his own note. English sentence capitalization is normalized, while French retains its lowercase sentence openings.