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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1793

May 19 [1793?]

On the fourteenth day of the month men call July, in the year that our common and perishable eras designate by the four digits 1789, there was a great noise in heaven. The immortals had seated themselves at the edge of matter, at that point in space where place begins and from which time receives its first measure and evil its first seed. Eternity, immensity, and happiness are beyond.

God had withdrawn into himself and hidden in the bosom of his own essence, as our sun does for us when it muffles itself in a cloud. This sun of spirits was no longer visible to them. Their happiness came no longer from his presence, but from his impression alone. In this absence of ecstasy and this vacancy of high contemplation, unable any longer to look upon being, they occupied themselves with the world. They spoke together of the lives of their friends, of their trials, of their past affections; and they spoke of virtue as fully formed men speak of their childhood when they have wise leisure.

Suddenly a shade appeared before them. Its form was those appearances of its body that a soul carries from the earth and keeps until after its purification. It held its head in its hands, and its head spoke. It said to them: “Yesterday, universal peace reigned in the regions from which I have come. Today, dead, full of life, killed outside war and struck down by an entire people in the functions of my magistracy, I arrive before my hour, astonished and innocent of this precipitate departure.”

As he spoke, an infinity of others arrived at the same time, all wounded like him, rising from the earth ceaselessly and swiftly, like rain falling upward. Some bore the appearances of arms, others the ornaments of peace, several even the clothes and peaceful tools of their sedentary labors. They all cried: “Receive us.” They were all shades of men who had been struck down at their posts and had died standing or seated at their duty. These had received murder. Those who had committed it, descending by another path, were arriving in the infernal places.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThis piece has no date other than “May 19.” But Joubert later added: “This is old.” The year is uncertain. I think one may choose 1793; Joubert would then have written this opening of a fantastic tale four months after the king’s death, which (we know) made a deep impression on him.

T41.The heading’s [1793?] is Beaunier’s conjecture; the manuscript date he reports is only May 19. Inside the narrative Joubert explicitly writes July 14 and 1789. Neither date has been replaced to reconcile the narrative with the source editor’s conjecture or its account of the king’s death.

S1.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “all their former affections.”

S2.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “It held its head between its hands.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “this.”

S4.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “in the regions.”

S5.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “from which I arrive.”

S6.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “... before the hour. May the faults I would have expiated, had they not taken away my time, fall upon my murderers.” As he spoke...

T42.The shade is introduced with it in English while its form is described, then speaks as the dead man; the following paragraph uses he. This follows the movement from French une ombre and elle to Comme il parloit. Received murder retains the unusual passive image of receivership in Ceux-ci avoient reçu le meurtre.

T48.The left edge of page 103 clips a few initial letters in this narrative’s continuation. Their complete forms are contextual restorations from the surviving print and syntax. These restorations are ours, distinct from the variants quoted in Beaunier’s source notes.

S7.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “a cloud.”

S8.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “Other shades.”

S9.Source editor’s annotationAt first: “like him, bruised by violent blows.”

S10.Source editor’s annotationInstead of “swiftly,” at first “with haste.”

S11.Source editor’s annotationThe same leaf: “May 23. The distractions and scruples that perspective and distance cause all farsighted writers. — Heedlessness, a principle of fecundity.”