— We beg you to receive everything you wish to give us.

To have such thoughts, one must have been struck more than one should, and occupied more than one should with a single object.

Always link unknown things to known ones.

Suicide. Then those who have lived for themselves die for themselves, disposing as they please of a life they had not devoted to the human race, to their country.

January 29.

One hastily throws the first word that comes along over one’s thought and marches on.

Monday, February 7, 1791.

Those proud Romans had a hard ear, which needed long caressing to open it and dispose it to hear good things. Hence the oratorical style found even in their wisest historians. Whereas the Greeks had perfect organs, easily set in motion, which needed only to be touched to be moved. Hence an elegant thought needed only the simplest adornment to please them. Hence pure truth sufficed for them in descriptions. Hence that simplicity of style in their authors and that brevity of their sentences, in which the writer observed above all the maxim: Nothing in excess. Great discrimination in thoughts and great clarity; words well matched and possessing their own harmony (a harmony produced among the Latins only by the arrangement and accord of all the members of their..) — in short, whatever was needed so that nothing delayed an impression — form in all their writers the distinctive character of their good literature. Only in Greeks spoiled by Roman life will you find that abundance of discourse opposed to purity. Never does an oratorical expression appear in their best historians; and in their greatest orators, eloquence is closer to history than history is to eloquence in their good narrators.

He is like the Sibyl. He fears the god.

October 24, 1791. Montignac.

The hours make the day’s four seasons.

Fasting: an imitation of suffering.

November 17, 1791.

The gods have taken good faith from him.

— No one shall be permitted to speak of his religion except in temples (in those places of inward concentration where men come only to hear such discourse).

— No intolerance shall be tolerated.

— Whoever attempts to distress another’s conscience and speaks ill to him of his altars shall be punished, because of the disturbance he intended.

— Any doctrine that does not say virtue is enough to please heaven belongs to a wicked man, a fanatic, or a hypocrite.

— Let each think what he wishes, provided he respects the public peace.

— A severe penalty shall be imposed on any priest who speaks ill of another priest on account of his functions.

— Whoever abandons his post loses it.

— No one may leave the camp; now an entire country is a camp when an entire people is threatened.

— Guard the hostages carefully.

— An enemy’s possessions are enemies. They are part of his strength, an item in his baggage, a piece of his armor; they are more, for they are a weapon. Now one may certainly disarm him.

— An enemy’s family is a hostage, material for exchange, a guarantee that the laws of war will be observed through fear of reprisals, a rampart against excesses. It must be guarded carefully, but it must not be destroyed. For it is not an enemy.

— Whoever is disarmed by force or by his own weakness is thereby no longer an enemy, but he may be a prisoner.

— The right to come and go may not be restricted except in extraordinary circumstances. Such circumstances always exist when there is not complete peace.

— Deportation shall be the penalty for all turbulent priests.

— Those who are merely suspected shall be paid to leave.

There are laws and decrees. Laws must bear the stamp of a reason raised above all particular cases. They must reign always. Decrees have only the circumstances in view: they are made by the legislator in his capacity as administrator and governor, not as legislator. It is a dictator’s order. They need not, like law, be the expression of eternal reason, but of prudence. They are made only for a time, for a moment. Laws fall silent in times of trouble; then decrees speak. Laws shine on fair days, decrees on cloudy ones. They veil the law as we sometimes veil in our temples what we honor there, to keep it from profanation at certain moments when worship is suspended. In the ordinary course of things one should follow only the law; when events stray from that course, one may legitimately be compelled to obey the decree as well. The one is divine and the other sacred... It keeps watch when the law falls asleep in the night that .... brings.

If certain exclusions are imposed on men without inherited wealth and without property, it is not because one should think they would love their country or virtue less. For they may love both with a kind of excess, and that opinion would do riches too much honor; but it is because we know, and each can convince himself through his own personal experience, that the man exposed to the waves of fate, to the storm of chance, is less master of himself, and lacks the calm, rest, leisure, and happiness to gather himself and regulate his feelings and thoughts, and risks going to extremes. He is less wise through no fault of his own, but through that of his situation. Only on this ground, until [such time as] that situation changes, may one refuse the administration of public affairs to a man who has had no personal affairs to manage. Etc. (Add that there is a test he has been unable to undergo.)