Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

They do not love truth if they do not love this diversity of opinions when it is sincere.

July […]6.

When a book gives a people a movement and the rules of that movement, the people follow the movement, but not the rules. This is the disadvantage Mr de Montesquieu’s work has had.

July 7.

Mr Fievé sometimes thinks and speaks like reasonable people, and then he is right.

July 8.

“You do not know men,” they will tell me. I shall reply: It is not necessary to know them either to love them or to be loved by them; it is enough to have seen them.

July 10.

Our masters did not make us laugh; they merely let us laugh out of their presence. They spoke only with great gravity, and said only maxims that, often repeated, were remembered forever.

These little girls who are not afraid of men; and of the life of those who begin by begging.

July 11.

In pleasures, moderation is not enough; there must be choice. The permissible.

Of religion and its use; or rather: Of God’s share; or: Of the share that must be allotted to him in political, domestic, civil, and moral affairs.

One must serve them one’s esteem (one’s friends) like a meal at which everything abounds, without fixing or cutting the portions.

Geoffroy. His mind plays the young man very well.

July 12.

Too old for falsehood, but not for truth.

Metaphysics has its wings...

T126.The source makes diversity itself sincere. The English retains that construction, without silently replacing diversity with the people who hold the opinions.

T127.Mouvement is repeated without assigning it exclusively to a political organization or a physical motion. The book is identified only as Mr de Montesquieu’s work in this entry. The damaged date remains […]6 juillet in the source metadata; no missing digit is conjectured.

T376.An enlarged facsimile shows a damaged terminal 6; a preceding character, if any, is not recoverable at the fold. No complete day is inferred. The partly obscured initial ce and C’est are restored.

T128.The source’s spelling Fievé is retained, despite the form Fiévée elsewhere in the edition. The turn from reasonable people to being right preserves raisonnables / raison as closely as ordinary English permits.

T129.The entry remains a fragment. D’abord marks an initial stage, but the source does not say what follows it or explain how the two observations are connected. No later occupation or fate is supplied.

T130.Le licite remains a separate nominal fragment. The English does not silently make it an explicit rule governing the preceding sentence’s choice of pleasures.

T131.The three formulations are successive alternatives within Joubert’s paragraph, not new editorial headings. The second is clarified by the third: part is the share or place to be allotted to God in the affairs listed.

T132.Taxer here is understood as fixing or assessing the portions, not levying a fiscal tax. The meal, abundance, and cutting of portions remain part of the same metaphor; the parenthesis identifies the friends to whom esteem is served.

T133.The facsimile prints jeune, without the circumflex of jeûne (fasting). Faire le jeune is rendered as playing the young man; no claim that Geoffroy is himself young is added.

T134.The wings and unfinished ellipsis remain as printed. No comparison or conclusion is supplied.