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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

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YEAR 1787

No individual date printed

Gates.

Instead of those magnificent gates that announced ancient cities, at the entrance to Paris you find only wickets. This splendid capital is closed by dismal barriers of firwood, where officials who search you look as though they are robbing you.

Those splendid arches of stone or marble that, in Greek and Roman cities, seemed to say to strangers, “Enter, and you will be safe,” announced public protection from the first. Here you meet the tax collector at the first step, and everything announces depredation.

The Tuileries, the theaters, the temples have no more magnificent entrances; low and paltry doors disfigure most public buildings. On this point one may say that the French are or are not less boastful...

Architects will tell you that a church has much more majesty when its entrance appears narrow and difficult. As though the house of God should not, more than all other buildings, have the air of welcome and invitation. The story is known of that young man who drew his sword against his friend, believing himself led into a house of confinement when he found himself in the vestibule of the old Comédie-Française amid a multitude of barriers and soldiers. Armed sentries stand at every church door on great feast days, which does not give a high idea of the religious spirit of our Frenchmen. If there is a fine sermon, entry is by ticket only, and that day only God’s rich and titled children are permitted to enter their father’s house.

Sentries are posted before private houses in certain circumstances for a fee. For example, during the first eight days of the year, you see two soldiers on duty before Le Sage’s shop to guard his pâtés. And the sweets of some confectioners are also guarded by armed force.

In general, everything in Paris breathes restriction, constraint, precaution; but it is only at this price that tranquility is enjoyed there.

Happy empire! If every part of your administration had been as thoroughly studied as the police.

Announcements of performances are posted at the doors of the great and of ministers. At the doors of attorneys and notaries you find notices of sales, seizures, inventories; in short, the catalog of a multitude of misfortunes of which the laws are often the cause.

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The Tomb of Lebrun’s Mother

Satiabor, says the inscription, cum apparuerit mihi gloria tua. The first of these words seems written between her lips. Old age is in the sinking [of the] mouth. One sees above all, in the shape from chin to neck, that she died aged; one sees it also in the shape of her hands. That expression of faith in her features and posture also bears witness to it. Youth has not so much habit of religion. Yet one sees that she had been young and beautiful before being aged and dead. One sees, moreover, from the confidence with which she rises for judgment, that she always lived virtuously. The life she has just taken up again is in her flesh; the impression of the tomb she is leaving is on the surface of her skin, slightly earthy and pale. There is in her features a character of venerable beauty. Matres, the Latins said when speaking of women of this age. This countenance is very fitting to that designation, and one is not surprised that the son of such a woman wished to dedicate such a monument to her. At the top of the chapel an angel has been represented with the fateful trumpet. The angel is out of place and produces only a bad effect. It would have been better simply to represent a trumpet among clouds in the vault. Imagination would have completed the picture. Even this accessory was unnecessary: the artist had known how to express it in the principal figure; the trumpet is in her..., in the character of her attention; those looks directed upward, those open hands that say so well, “I am ready,” that modest and pious surge: everything says enough that a sound has been heard and the dead are about to rise.

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The Carmelites of the Rue de Grenelle

One can say that whoever built this church built a prison for God. Nothing is missing: thick walls, small high windows, grilles and wickets, narrowness, darkness. To complete this masterpiece, an underground chamber has been contrived in this beautiful sanctuary. The church is the prison; the underground chamber is the dungeon.

No individual date printed

At Saint Sulpice

I have seen no piece of sculpture that fulfilled its purpose so well. It is indeed the only example in which I have seen, among us, statues have a definite object and produce a public effect. An angel of bronze stands before the seated priest and, with eyes respectfully lowered, spreads before the priest’s eyes the book containing the canticles. Ah! How much do you think the impression of such a representation lowers man and raises the priest! It is in such temples that man is religious and becomes a slave; it is before such altars that he learns servitude. For every religious feeling is a servile feeling, and whoever kneels before God trains himself to prostrate himself before a king.

No individual date printed

... And than the stone of French quarries.

Those festoons suspended on bare walls that nothing adorns, and those garlands sad as the flowers growing in the corner of an abandoned garden...

A million little panes of glass, united by the ligaments of lead that entwine them, form only a single whole; their innumerable parts join together to the eye in a common ensemble, and in their divided compartments give a diminished light fitting to temples. Those square panes, on the contrary, offer nothing but paltriness in their middling proportions and their multiplicity. They are too easy to count, and the light they produce is too harsh.

— In the plain they seem to rise from the earth and flee it. On the hillsides, on the contrary, they seem to reenter it with effort; and there their very height gives them, to the eye, a weight that sinks them into it.

— That multitude of angles whose sharp points break the gaze, and which accord so little with the beautiful contours of the portal and the dome.

— Continuous bas-reliefs ought to have displayed the saint’s life all the way around it and girdled the whole building with a succession of historical and pious representations.

— In general, a temple must resemble the palace of the sun. A hundred steps should scarcely suffice to ascend to it.

— ...like the stable where she was born...

— Measure its elevation from its summit to its base...

— ...and like the last steps of a buried staircase.

— Instead of making this building stand, he ought to have seated it.

S1.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “dark and.”

S2.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “A thing that seemed to him to exist only through good faith.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “You find them before the doors of private persons giving a ball; the pastry cook Le Sage has two sentries before his door during the.”

S1.Source editor’s annotationThe third page on which this chapter is written contains as a palimpsest a biblical translation: “Naïc, son of Amos, had this vision...”, etc. And the booklet’s last leaf is occupied by extracts from Mercier’s Picture of Paris”; brief quotations whose references in the Amsterdam edition of 1782 are as follows: volume I, page 88; page 95; page 98; page 113; page 293. But the quotations are not verbatim: here Joubert summarizes, there he comments, arranges, and seems to remake the Picture of Paris.

T44.Boastful renders the personal sense of avantageux, supported by historical usage for a self-assured or presumptuous person. The comparison is unfinished, however, and advantageous remains another possible sense. No missing comparison or conclusion is supplied. Source note 2 prints exorter; English reads exist, supported by exister in the preceding blindman’s-buff account. Its call is printed here after narrow and difficult, although the variant appears to belong to that preceding account. The anomalous call placement is preserved.

T45.Source note 1 on p. 77 reads Naïc, son of Amos in the collated facsimile. The name may involve a damaged or mistaken reading, but no replacement has been established. Naïc and the note’s unmatched closing quotation mark remain visible.

S2.Source editor’s annotationAnother leaf: I believe it belongs to this group. (Separate, undated leaf.) There is a passage about this tomb of Lebrun’s mother in a letter from Marlin, dated May 1, 1792 (A Little History, volume II, page 391): “On my way I find the church of St-Nicolas du Chardonnet, a modern monument of a heaviness that marks its age; nevertheless one must enter it, and in one of the dark chapels surrounding the choir, notice two cenotaphs: Lebrun’s and his mother’s. He himself erected the latter. There he represents his mother coming out of the tomb on the day of resurrection. Happy Lebrun! This monument raised by your hands to a mother you loved is greater than the favor of a king, than the glory of your art and all your successes!” It is possible that Joubert pointed out this tomb to his friend Marlin.

S3.Source editor’s annotationFirst: “is in her mouth.”

S4.Source editor’s annotationCancellation, illegible.

T46.The inscription is retained in Latin so that Joubert’s reference to its first word is intelligible: Satiabor, I shall be satisfied; cum apparuerit mihi gloria tua, when your glory has appeared to me. Matres means mothers or matrons. The angel, rather than its trumpet, is the antecedent of the following judgment that it is out of place. The gap in the trumpet is in her… remains unfinished.

S1.Source editor’s annotationSame leaf.

S2.Source editor’s annotationAnother leaf.

S3.Source editor’s annotationAnother leaf. I wonder whether it may concern the Panthéon (Ste-Geneviève).

S1.Source editor’s annotationPerhaps it is not imprudent to connect with this period an undated leaf containing a few notes on architecture: “The Corinthian is divine, the Ionic celestial, the Doric royal, the Tuscan powerful. The Corinthian suits temples, the Ionic sacred places, the Doric palaces, the Tuscan castles. The Corinthian well suits a king’s house, the Ionic the house of a king’s son, the Doric the house of a king’s brother, the Tuscan a viceroy’s palace. The Corinthian must be placed in the middle of the city, the Ionic around the public square, the Doric at the gates, the Tuscan in the suburbs. — Note. At Athens, the temple dedicated to Minerva under the name of Parthenon, or temple of the Virgin. — (Vegetius wrote on that part of architecture which is military and properly concerns fortifications.)” And also this leaf: “What gave the temple majesty was neither its walls nor its decoration, but the gathering and respect of the multitude that came to pray there.”

T47.The opening Et que la pierre is isolated by a preceding ellipsis. And than the stone is a provisional comparative reading of que; and that the stone is also possible. No missing clause has been supplied. Later she refers to the saint, whose identity is not named in the fragment. Beaunier only tentatively associates the leaf with the Panthéon (Ste-Geneviève). The opening dashes and incomplete architectural comparisons are retained.