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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1787

No individual date printed

Musicians by Night

They are the hurdy-gurdy women and that multitude of jugglers, violins, hunting horns, oboes, who run through the streets and give you delicious music beneath your windows for a small silver coin. This music is ravishing in the silence of night and in the distance of a multitude of deserted streets; the most unfeeling men cannot hear it without emotion.

Poor unfortunates! You are the benefactors of humanity. You often give a feeling of joy to the afflicted man, and the poor man lying sad in his garret awakens and rejoices at the melodious sounds of your agreeable instruments. Through you alone he enjoys the benefit of the fine arts. He will never enter the temple of harmony. The voice of Colombe and of [ ] will always be unknown to him; but you have made harmony popular and common, you lead it into the streets, and you let the indigent hear, free of charge, the most beautiful airs of Grétri, Monsigni, Philidor, and the charming songs of Dezaides. Alas, the poor man’s ear is so often afflicted by words; I bless you, O you who console it with sounds.

These musicians, who walk in small troops, also travel through the city by day. In summer you might sometimes think yourself in that city of Baghdad spoken of in The Thousand and One Nights, where the streets were sprinkled with scented waters and the houses resounded with songs of gladness.

The bouquets heaped at the crossroads and perfuming the air, the wandering musicians who play together at intervals along the way, a multitude of decent people at their windows: all this combined sometimes has an inexpressible charm, of which it is difficult to conceive an idea.

No individual date printed

Common Songs.

Songs are the morality of the people, and it is astonishing that the police tolerate the abuses that prevail in this sphere. I have heard the most obscene vulgarities sung with gestures more revolting than the words, and these obscenities were printed and sung with approval. At the end of a collection of this kind one sometimes reads: — By Jérôme or Nicolas So-and-so, baker’s boy on such-and-such a street. And it is sold and bought.

Very well: there must be books for everyone; along with the songs of Jérôme or Nicolas, the verses of our most delicate minds are sometimes peddled.

Formerly, some good tale of miracles or harassment by the devil was usually sung once a week; but these subjects have become rare. Today scarcely anything is sung but war songs still more debauched than the ways of life of our soldiers, or love songs coarser than the loves of the Porcherons.

I would award a civic crown to the man of talent who did not disdain to work sometimes for the daughters of the people and who, teaching them to express decent feelings simply, would teach them to feel them. Would it then be a paltry glory to give modesty to beauty, which no longer has it, above all in the lowest classes, in Paris.

No individual date printed

La Morne.

It is a place worthy of its name.

It is a dungeon enclosed by thick black walls; a perpetual dampness runs from them onto the pavement. On this stone pavement, always wet with blood or water, lie the naked bodies of the unfortunates whom fatal accidents or nocturnal crimes have stripped of life without their wives and children knowing. It is there that wives and children, alarmed by the sudden disappearance of a father, a son, or a husband, hurry to recognize him among the multitude of corpses seen stretched upon the ground.

They can be made out through a narrow opening fitted with iron bars; they are displayed naked and uncovered so that it may be easier to recognize them; a multitude of women and men approach this fateful grille each day trembling, and withdraw in despair.

O who could tell and count in how many ways life is taken from the healthy and robust man in this unhappy capital, and by how many means one can die there!

While foul air, poisoned wine, bad food, hospital treatment, and the grief that kills slowly, and hunger and pain, and shame and despair undermine men there and make them expire in beds, falling roofs, breaking carriages, the wheels of gilded coaches and the feet of horses, and private quarrels, and anger that makes men ferocious, and brutality that makes them frenzied kill, before the face of heaven and earth, a multitude of unfortunates who will never return to their houses. It must be admitted that murders are very rare in Paris; you can walk there without fearing your enemy. And this city will not be reproached with the daggers that love and vengeance so often sharpen in Italy and Spain. But a thousand other causes make killings numerous there and death fairly common.

No individual date printed

[Deaf-mutes]

It is not rare to find deaf-mutes in our countryside. Generally they are excellent workers, very hardworking and very skillful; for a rather remarkable thing is that they have little taste for work in the fields that requires only an easy routine, and are full of ardor for the arts that exercise a great measure of strength and ingenuity.

The one I observed in Paris was an excellent locksmith. He was in the habit of leaving his trade for domestic service for six months of the year, and domestic service for his trade. What attached him to domestic service was the ease of seeing many things, for he was very curious. A long journey, and above all a sea voyage, was a lure he could not resist. One was sure to engage him by promising such a journey.

Another attraction that service to rich men held for him was that most of these duties call for a certain grace, which he was delighted to be able to develop. As his condition and his intelligence made him an object of attention, and as he had enjoyed a kind of consideration in the lowest employments, he had never found himself humiliated. And so he felt at ease with decent people. He sought their company, and without stepping out of his place, he had a decent and polite familiarity with all men.

He was very attached to subordination. It is opinion alone that makes inequality, and that we are crueler toward the people in our words than in our actions; because he could hear only with his eyes, he was ignorant of the unhappiness of the lower classes, and social inequality had in his eyes the same charms that an uneven terrain divided by a multitude of terraces has for our eyes.

He was singularly respectful toward women of every class, and though young, vigorous, and even a little libertine, an indecent gesture filled him with horror. The ease with which he made himself understood rendered the lack of speech more bearable to him than the lack of hearing. I have seen him, in a fit of despair, seize a knife and direct its point toward his ear with a gesture whose energy and speed nothing could equal, and a plaintive cry that said with incredible eloquence: Ah! If I could pierce [my] ears; if it were possible for me to hear!

He had several kinds of style in his gestures. And each of these styles had a different construction. The same object was placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of his sentence according to whether he spoke with more or less vehemence and sensibility.

He could have supplied very good observations to a painter and a writer of comedy through the way he designated characters, professions, social stations. He expressed social stations and characters through gait, and professions through the postures peculiar to each kind of work.

He had a strict probity. I saw a rather singular example of it that may do him honor. One winter day I took him into a select company where they were amusing themselves with blindman’s buff. You know that the game consists in guessing, with one’s eyes closed, who the person one is touching is, and that consequently it was easy for a deaf man to know this, and for a mute, etc. Here is how he went about it. In his thoughts he named the one he wanted as his successor, and searched for him with the blindfold over his eyes. When he thought he had hold of him, he took off the blindfold with great bursts of laughter. He put it back on very quickly and in great shame if he saw he had been mistaken, and faithfully kept it on until he had found the person he had imagined. I have seen him tire himself in this way for [a] half hour to no purpose, without boredom or joking being able to make him fail in good faith in a thing that seemed to him to exist only through good faith.

S2.Source editor’s annotationThis title is not Joubert’s. I use it to indicate an analogy between these little essays by Joubert and Mercier’s Picture of Paris, from which Joubert copies extracts on the same leaves where he sketches his own little pictures of Paris. And I assign this picture of Paris by Joubert to the year 1787: it is only a hypothesis. Quite simply, I connect them with that encounter with Mercier in a café noted on January 14, 1787. Joubert’s leaves are undated: they certainly belong to his youth; that is all I wish to say of them.

S3.Source editor’s annotationAll this (until further notice) comes from a small booklet formed of a double sheet (four pages), a single sheet (two pages), two double sheets, and one double sheet of a different size, the whole tied with a blue string.

S4.Source editor’s annotationCanceled: “It gladdens the poor man lying at this late hour in his garret.”

S1.Source editor’s annotationCanceled: “Banished forever.”

S2.Source editor’s annotationJoubert left the name blank.

S3.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “wounded.”

T40.[Tableau de Paris] is Beaunier’s supplied collective title, translated [Picture of Paris]. The grouping under 1787 is expressly his hypothesis; the sketches themselves are undated. His source note distinguishes Joubert’s observations, summaries, and revisions from verbatim copying of Mercier. The singer’s name after Colombe is blank in the source and remains [ ]. Bibliographic titles translated in this apparatus are fresh descriptive translations, not claims about published English editions.

T41.The lowercase porcherons is rendered Porcherons provisionally as a Paris place name; a historical common-noun reading referring to swineherds is also possible. The fragment itself does not settle the reference.

T42.The facsimile visibly prints La Morne. The heading is retained in both languages although the ensuing description suggests a morgue. No silent replacement with La Morgue has been made. In the final paragraph, assassinats is rendered murders, its broader historical sense of planned private killing, and meurtres as killings.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn the leaf where he wrote this, Joubert had begun a letter that he abandoned: “I have long delayed answering you, my dear Ponchet, in order to give you a definite answer. Vous la.” Another leaf gives this brief opening of the chapter: “I knew in Paris a deaf and mute man, an excellent locksmith. This class of unfortunate men...”

S2.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “trades.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “He quite often left the shop to be a domestic servant. He had half the year...”

S1.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “of curiosity.”

S2.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “and did he deal with.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “as it is opinion”; what follows in the sentence continues to depend on this abandoned movement.

S4.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “he had all the modesty of a...”

S5.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “on a table.”

T43.The supplied heading [Les Sourds-muets] is translated [Deaf-mutes], preserving the historical category separately from the running account. The broken syntax in the paragraph beginning He was very attached to subordination follows an abandoned comme construction, as Beaunier explains; no new grammatical conclusion has been supplied. The letter fragment Vous la is retained in French in the English apparatus: roughly you … it/her, but neither a verb nor a complete construction survives.