Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1807

September 4.

It is reasonable not to examine what concerns the gods and the laws, unless one has been appointed a reformer.

... at that age... And in faces one sees only physiognomies, — in stature and trunk only the support of the head, — in all the rest only the accompaniment of the trunk, — in all human bodies, finally, only dwellings for souls.

September 5.

Heaven had given strength to my mind only for a time — and that time is past.

September 9.

(At Villeneuve.) Indeed, she “has never learned to speak well.” And I, I have never learned to speak ill, to insult and to curse.

The ancients all have grace. At least the Greeks, for I do not claim to speak of the others.

September 12.

“My nieces instead of prayer...” Quintilian would not have approved this joke. What is worst (he would have said), the composition plays in a sad matter.

September 13.

Indeed, one must speak of beautiful things with rapture; and what is more beautiful than what is perfectly spiritual?

Yes, it is a simple being (the soul), but nevertheless a clothed being. God alone is perfectly simple, for nothing can envelop him.

September 14–20.

14, departure; return on the 20th. — On the 16th, Ancy le franc. — On the 17th, Mlle Blesseau — Semur, etc. On the 18th, Alyse and the château de Bussy. — On the 19th. Epoisses. Mme de Guitaud and that charming Bourbilly. On the 20th, recapitulation.

Ah! What evils! The English are brought up to respect serious things and the French to make a habit of mocking them.

At Flogny. The clipped hedge and the hornbeam hedge are the fitting enclosure for the garden. The high hedge and the stand of tall trees are better suited to the borders of the field.

Mme de Guitaud. — The ground of all souls is the same. But the ground of all minds is not.

One must know how to do without one’s imagination. But when it suffices to act, one must also know how to do without one’s reason, that is to say that... That is to say that there are subjects, studies, affairs, pleasures in which one must use only reason or only one’s imagination, the one without the other: it being understood that what is done without reason will not be done against reason.

September […]1.

Comedy corrects only foibles and manners, and often at the expense of morals. For example, Tartuffe, — and La Petite ville...

Good maxims and their irresistible force.

September […]3.

The saints all offer some canonized virtue to human attention. And high philosophy values truth less as a means than as an end.

Let us distinguish error from fable. And a beautiful sentiment is worth more than a fact and a certainty.

Credulity, that happy ignorance of fraud.

Children demand that facts be true, because they care only about facts. In mature age, one cares only about the effect, or the disposition of soul and mind that results from the account, the narration, the supposition of the fact. We dispute hypotheses only when some bad consequence can be deduced directly from them.

T112.Appointed renders constitué in the sense of being set in a role. The French does not identify the appointing authority or explain how that status is acquired. The plural gods is retained.

T113.Physiognomies keeps the distinction from faces without replacing it by a claim about physiognomy as a science. The repeated only and the stages from head to trunk to dwelling preserve the restrictive progression; that age is not assigned a number.

T287.The opening ellipses and repeated restrictive constructions retain their printed punctuation. The right-edge endings of physionomies, dans and corps are partly lost and restored from their surviving forms and syntax.

T114.Had given preserves the past-perfect tense before the present conclusion. Heaven remains the source’s term, and time is repeated; no biographical diagnosis is supplied.

T288.The dash at the right edge is merged with heavy margin damage; its horizontal trace is retained with uncertainty.

T115.The circumstance At Villeneuve stays in the text. She remains unidentified. And I, I retains the emphatic Et moi, je, and speak ill keeps both the verbal reversal and the following insults and curses.

T289.A in the opening circumstance is unaccented. Villeneuve alone is italic. The closing quotation lies against the damaged right margin; its form is partly visible, while the following period is retained with uncertainty as the sentence boundary. The unnamed feminine elle is not identified.

T116.The quoted nièces is translated nieces without substituting a conjectural pun or completing the verse. Instead of renders au lieu de. Indexed excerpts of Voltaire’s Épître à M. le maréchal de Villars place the line in a contrast between grand and modest funerals; the complete poem and its page images were not directly checked here, and no date or particular source copy is asserted. The Latin parallels Quintilian, Institutio oratoria IX.4.28, on playful arrangement in a sorrowful subject, following a funerary example from Maecenas. Joubert omits inter haec and quia and inserts his own hypothetical aside. The Latin is translated around that unitalicized French parenthesis. Composition names the arrangement of language, and plays retains ludit; sad renders tristi. The conditional attribution is hypothetical, not a claim that Quintilian commented on Voltaire’s joke.

T117.Simple is not reduced to uncomplicated temperament; the soul remains a simple being that is nevertheless clothed. Envelop preserves the final physical image. This paragraph is a separate undated unit after its own printed asterisk.

T292.This undated paragraph follows its own printed centered asterisk; it does not inherit the preceding September 13 as a new printed date.

T118.The individual days stay inside the one source date-range entry. Place and personal names retain their printed forms. Recapitulation interprets the qualified nonstandard recoputulation contextually; the French is not silently regularized. No unstated travel event is added.

T293.The source gives a date range followed by individual travel days inside paragraph 1; none becomes a new unit. The first printed Le 19 ends with a period, not a comma. Ancy le franc, Alyse, Epoisses and Bourbilly retain their spellings; Mlle and Mme are baseline type. The line-wrapped recoputulation is a qualified reading of the printed nonstandard spelling: the glyph after c is a closed o-like oval, and u follows p; no acute is visible over the first e. Paragraph 3 continues onto page 627, followed by two more physical paragraphs before the next source asterisk. A in A Flogny is unaccented; haye and futaye retain y. The masculine l’un sans l’autre remains after the two feminine faculty names. The source annotation call follows the final raison before its period.

T119.Hornbeam hedge translates charmille in the garden context, and stand of tall trees translates futaye. The Académie’s 1798 definitions (I, pp. 225 and 624) distinguish young hornbeams, with a palisade as an example, from woodland composed of large trees without specifying a species. Hedge is a contextual rendering, not the only possible form of charmille. The clipped garden enclosure is distinguished from the taller growth around the field. The sentence continues across the printed page without a new paragraph.

T120.Ground renders fonds as an underlying substance or foundation and repeats for both faculties. The source’s distinction is retained without attributing a full metaphysical doctrine to the named interlocutor.

S1.Source editor’s annotationA sheet of quotations entitled “Letters from the prince de Condé to M. de Guitaud. Manuscript.” relates to Joubert’s stay at Epoisses with Mme de Guitaud.

T121.The source repeats that is to say across an unfinished clause. The one without the other is applied to the two faculties; the masculine French pronouns do not create a new person. The closing qualification distinguishes doing without reason from acting against it.

T122.The translated title remains part of Beaunier’s apparatus. It names a manuscript sheet of quotations; no shelfmark, date, or location is supplied beyond the printed statement.

T123.Foibles and manners remain distinct from morals, preserving the difference between travers, manières, and mœurs. The play titles are retained in French. The incomplete date retains only its certified final digit.

T295.The preceding day glyph survives only as detached strokes at the damaged left margin; only final 1 is secure. No 21 is inferred from chronology. The second physical paragraph remains nominal. The left-edge au in aux is partly lost and restored from the surviving ending and construction.

T124.Canonized modifies virtue, as in the French. High philosophy values truth more as an end than as a means, not the reverse. The date’s missing initial digit remains unfilled.

T296.The preceding day digit is reduced to arcs and a lower fragment; only terminal 3 is secure. No 23 is supplied from sequence. The damaged left edge partly obscures canonisée, que and qu’un, which are restored from their surviving letters and immediate line continuations.

T125.Fable is distinguished from error rather than equated with it. A beautiful sentiment retains the source’s breadth of feeling and inward judgment; fact and certainty remain separate terms of comparison.

T297.The opening nominal sentence is a separate physical paragraph. The left-edge openings of Les, soucient, ou, narration, lorsqu’on and mauvaise are partly clipped and restored from surviving letters and immediate continuations.

T126.The repetition of facts and the turn to effect remain. Account, narration, and supposition are not merged into a single act of storytelling. The final condition concerns a bad consequence deduced directly from a hypothesis.