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YEAR 1789.
— February 8. Late, at hour hᵃ̂. Convers. with perister, return to a sound mind.
— February 10. Distress of Cⁿᵉ.
— Paris: that city where the air is perpetually stirred.
February 16.
“I don’t give a damn about my power,” Louis XVI said to the Vicomte de Noailles, “provided my people are happy.” There is an ugly word that has become very respectable. He also said: “I shall always be great enough in my country.”
Numero... impare gaudet. (Virg.) They love inequality.
A people’s political freedom consists in governing itself as it wishes; its religious freedom, in believing what it wishes; its freedom of commerce, in selling and buying as it pleases.
The pleasure of hunting is the pleasure of attaining.
(Recollection of F-s, March 20, 1789).
March 23.
It is a fairly good book and a very bad drama.
The Athenians are caricatured in it, after the comic writers and Theophrastus; it is as if one were to portray the age of Louis XIV after Regnard and La Bruyère. Events from centuries that did not exist are attributed in it to the present century; this is to compose a picture of manners from utterly disparate features. Demosthenes is judged in it on Aeschines’ authority; it is as if the life of Corneille were told on the Abbé d’Aubignac’s authority. He does not show the French as resembling the Athenians, but the Athenians as resembling the French. He even gives them fops, such as we had only for a moment in the time of Dorat and Molé.
The points of all the repartees are almost all blunted in his translations.
Euripides is criticized in it on Aristophanes’ authority.
He often speaks to us of young Athenians who had just entered society.
— You will always be content with yourself. — That is the reward the imitative arts must hold out to virtue; it would be making her a rash and lying promise to say to her, — you will always be content with your fate.
He says that the Rhodians remained in armed neutrality. He calls the hangman the executor of high justice.
He disparages Simonides on the authority of Aelian and Athenaeus, compilers of every rumor, every report, who lived only several centuries after that poet.
There are some who merely embellish the sky; there are others who make the seasons, the days, and the hours...
March 28, Saturday, 1789, on learning some news.
March 30, 1789.
I feel your desires drawing me (aspirare).
Saturday, April 4, 1789.
Everything loses itself in his imagination, and almost nothing takes shape there...
April 17, 1789.
— There is no blank paper left on earth, and the source of ink has dried up. — Give my pen a point of iron or diamond, sheets of copper; I shall engrave on them... —
— They say, young Clermont...
Comte de Lauragais, you live without horses and without servants. Soon you will live without mistresses! Alas, time, in taking all its strength from the body, takes all its weaknesses from the heart... You had made a beautiful work in the gardens of Manicamp; winter tore its pages.
Your trees have... They will line the black shore. So great a misfortune has left you cold and calm; the work of the constitution alone occupies you and... Thus the poet forgot and abandoned to the tooth of envy his eclogues and georgics, to compose his Aeneid and found the Roman people. Etc.
What do you say, brave Lafayette... Heaven seems to have brought you into the world to see free empires take shape and defend them in their cradle...