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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1788.

[Notebook notes]

— December 25, 1787, Sunday. Saint Catherine’s Day. Walk at 10 in the evening.

— January 30, the Wednesday before Shrove Tuesday, 1788. Edmeton’s wedding.

— February 5, Shrove Tuesday. Morning awakening. Supper. Evening.

— February 7. Arrival of Fontanes. Walk to Beaudemond, March 19, Saint Joseph’s Day; white wine. — At Val profonde, April: song in the vineyard. Walk to Baujard beforehand. Bleating lambs.

— March 24, the day after Easter. Boulettes at Saint-Martin.

— March 29, 1788. — Delicias domini... It is a shepherd in love with a young slave.

— May 7, Wednesday. Departure of my cousin.

— 8, 9, 10, walks and evening games.

— 22, first feast of Corpus Christi.

— 29, Octave.

— 22, the abbé.

— Wednesday, July 2, return. Summer temperat. Sculpture seen on a peasant’s door. Reflections.

— Thursday 3. Walk in the morning. Writ. this, afternoon.

— 14. Passage of Mme R... on the coach.

— October 2, 1788. — Reverie from the hilltops at five in the evening. To bed at a quarter past 3 in the morning.

July 30, 1788.

Impartiality springs from a disposition to judge men and things favorably.

[1788.]

Victories are the lot of peoples fallen into decline, just as they are of peoples coming into prosperity.

“Verses written by M. Joubert the elder for the feast day of M. Martineau the father in 1788 and sung by M. Martineau, his eldest son.”

Tune: On compterait ses diamants.

I am the eldest of the seven children whose father you celebrate here, and have known him from the time my eyes first saw the light; I shall paint him feature by feature, I shall tell the truth itself: his portrait is easily drawn, He always shows himself the same

The mother who nourished us, whose beloved features the liveliest youth still colors, is happy in his tenderness; he is grave, he is serious, my young sisters love to laugh, and yet in all our games he is the first we want.

He lives without guile at the courthouse, he is a son to his father-in-law, a guardian to all his servants, a brother to his clients; the oppressor has no enemy more unyielding and more stern, and the innocent no friend more fearless and more sincere.

If he is not always loved by those his frankness has wounded, he is always esteemed by them. I have no fear of being contradicted. Everywhere they praise his reason and his virtue, stern and bare, he would have been renowned in his district even had he driven the plow.

He is proud, not of being an orator and not of being acclaimed worthy to be a legislator; he is proud only of being an honest man, I stop at this last feature... it is worth all the others together; I promised you his portrait, applaud, for it is a likeness.

Joubert the elder.

[1786, 1787 or 1788.]

“Virtue partakes of the earth,” says Plutarch. Wisdom is wholly celestial.

It is the mean (Plutarch says again), taking away on one side from what is excessive and adding on the other to what is deficient.

Most of Plutarch’s treatises were written to be read in lecture halls, philosophers then reading their own [works] aloud.

S2.Source editor’s annotationThere is, so to speak, nothing from the year 1788 except an extensive work concerning Cook’s voyages.

S3.Source editor’s annotationThese little notes are, I admit, scarcely intelligible and of little interest.

T1.The notebook block begins within the printed 1788 section but gives December 25, 1787, Sunday, Saint Catherine’s Day. The date, weekday, and feast do not agree. All are retained as printed; no alternative date is silently substituted. The following brief dates remain parts of this single notebook block, rather than dates invented for separate entries.

T2.Boulettes is retained in French. The ordinary word can mean small balls or dumplings, but this terse reference does not establish what took place at Saint-Martin.

T3.Delicias domini is Latin, literally the master’s delights, an expression that can refer to a beloved favorite. It remains beside Joubert’s own explanation. The text does not give the young slave’s age.

S4.Source editor’s annotationThis, too, without a precise date: “Paid by my cousin, pomade 7 sols. Chocolate...” On this May 7, Joubert is reading Duperron de Castera’s Camoëns. He takes extracts and notes from it. — An undated leaf contains this: “So rare is a great imagination, even among those that are unbridled. From Camoëns.”

S5.Source editor’s annotationIs this the Abbé Moreau? For Joubert was already acquainted with the Moreau family.

T4.Temperat. and Writ. preserve the abbreviated character of Températ. and Ecritur. The latter remains a fragment; its precise relation to this notebook is not supplied.

S6.Source editor’s annotationVillevallier, a little less than two leagues south of Villeneuve, on the road from Paris to Lyon.

S1.Source editor’s annotationMme R.: is this Mme Restif?

T5.Coche may mean a coach or a passenger boat. Coach is provisional here; the note does not establish the mode of transport.

S2.Source editor’s annotationI assign this thought (a curious one, moreover) to the year 1788 for the reason (an imperfect one, moreover) that the leaf on which it is written bears on its reverse a reference to the “Mercure of 1788, no. 15, Saturday, April 12. Acct. of the captiv. of the English in India. Satire V, book I.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationFrom the end of June 1788 there are notes on the landscape of Villeneuve that Joubert used for his “letter to a count”: notes and letter are in the correspondence.

S4.Source editor’s annotationThe little verses that follow are not copied in Joubert’s hand; but the signature is his.

T6.The heading attributes the verses to Joubert and says that Martineau’s eldest son sang them for his father’s feast day. The first-person speaker is that son. The tune title On compterait ses diamants is retained as a title; literally, it means one could count his or her diamonds. The English follows the five eight-line stanzas without imposing a new rhyme scheme.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThese lines are undated; but the leaf on which I find them contains a fragment of the eulogy of Cook.