The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I · Book Mode · Diotimos

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Reading language

YEAR 1786.

No individual date printed

The useful! This word speaks only to the mind. The beautiful! [This] one awakens the imagination. The good!... The man of sense...

No individual date printed

One may speak to men of destruction only to make them think of duration, or show them death only to make them think of life. To do otherwise is to wish to stop the mind halfway along a slippery and disagreeable path; for indeed death runs toward life, and destruction rushes into duration.

August 12, 1786.

One can please only through her forms, the other only through her movements. The first needs a bodice that molds her, a single petticoat, a simple cap; the second needs flounces, loose hair, floating gauzes; one follows the latter with pleasure, one stops involuntarily before the other. The impression the second has made on us can be renewed, but the impression the first has caused is the only lasting one.

October 2, 1786.

Those beautiful boatwomen...

October 3.

Journey with an artist. — “It is something one does not see often enough.” — “A man who becomes sun...” — Preeminence of coloring. Rainbow. — The white house. — Coppery is better than leaden. — Washed hair.

October 5.

A lesson in decency given by a fallen woman...

October; day cut off in facsimile

A Capuchin blessed me. I consoled a thief.

October; day cut off in facsimile

The good girl. The laughing one. The composed one and the tender one.

October; day cut off in facsimile

The pretty one and the easy woman. The decent man.

October; day cut off in facsimile

My mother...

All slopes are gentler in lands formed by water... In those formed by fire, everything, on the contrary, is steep. In the former one recognizes the action of an element whose operations are performed at ease and slowly; in the latter one cannot mistake the operations of an infinitely active and abrupt power...

No individual date printed

Planted the poplar.

October; day cut off in facsimile

The paths. Their effects in the landscape. On the hillside they have the same effect that the river produces in the plain.

T5.The facsimile prints celui[-ci], bracketing only the proximal ending. English [This] one places brackets around the word that carries the proximal sense and leaves one outside; it corresponds to the French editorial intervention without claiming a mechanically identical division between languages. Esprit is rendered as mind. The final two fragments remain incomplete. French punctuation spacing is normalized.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn another, undated leaf: “The grace of some lies in their manners. The grace of others lies in their postures.” Then: “The ancients imagined there was a fountain where Juno went to wash every day, and that each time she washed there she recovered her virginity. This fountain is a symbol of extreme cleanliness...”

T19.The latter is understood as the second woman, characterized by movement, whom the viewer follows; the other is the first woman, characterized by form, before whom the viewer stops. This follows the surrounding actions and the final distinction. Cornette is rendered cap in its historical sense of a woman’s head covering.

S2.Source editor’s annotationHere Joubert’s notebooks begin. Until then he wrote on loose sheets or small scraps of paper. From now on he will use notebooks and sheets. The notebooks will accompany his thought throughout his life, for nearly forty more years. They begin with the journey he made to Villeneuve, accompanying his mother. It is the landscape of Villeneuve that he notes on the first pages of his notebooks.

S3.Source editor’s annotationJoubert wrote these three words in the middle of the line, with all the care of his pencil, and framed them with little stars. Mysterious, those three words. But on a leaf dated February 2, 1787, Joubert, recounting the arrival of Cook and his companions in Tahiti, writes: “Neither the naiads nor the napeae offer the imagination more charms than those laughing boatwomen displayed to their enchanted gaze.” There are the beautiful boatwomen around whom Joubert dreamed on October 2, 1786, and whom women of Villeneuve-le-Roi on the little bridge over the Yonne may have evoked in his imagination. And there, very elliptical yet significant, is the oldest dated testimony we have to the pleasure Cook’s voyages gave his mind. Besides, we know from Fontanes’s letters that he was already studying the great navigator’s life in 1785.

T20.Boatwomen keeps the navigation sense of marinières. The fragment does not establish the women’s occupation or identity; Beaunier’s associations in the source note remain conjectures. That note’s Ni…ni…n’offrent pas has a redundant negative: English gives the evident neither…nor comparison without duplicating the negation.

T21.The opening day numbers of the first four October entries on p. 61 are cut off in this facsimile. The later printed 9 octobre may also have lost a preceding digit. These are partly legible printed dates, not undated entries. No day number has been reconstructed and no complete calendar date has been assigned.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThis reflection is suggested to Joubert by the gentle valley of Villeneuve. In his unpublished Recollections, Arnaud Joubert writes: “[This pretty country] charmed us at first by its smiling situation, its agreeable valleys, its hillsides, the most beautiful in all wine-growing country, and its charming walks, above all an avenue of poplars nearly a league long...”

S2.Source editor’s annotationJoubert had first written “in the landscape.”