[September 28.]

“When one saw in sculpture, no more than in painting, merely a means of telling, so to speak, facts, one had to prefer the bas-relief on which an entire scene takes place... [etc.]... One would scarcely have understood then the critic who would have come to say that the human figure, naked, isolated, considered in the admirable relation its parts have to one another, is the principal object of sculpture... [etc.]...” (N. B. Journal de l’Empire, September 28, 1812.) Have to one another: above all in the various affections with which the soul can be filled. Without this, one makes only a plaster cast, a molded body and not an inhabited body.

My expression inhabited body. Far too many bodies without souls are painted for us. The most skillful, like Gérard, take life as their ultimate goal and make only living bodies. And even to attain the object and arrive at its utility and beauty, it is not enough that a figure seem animated by a passion as an animal can be, but by a passion in which the spiritual soul participates. Every painter [and] every sculptor who does not show and does not prove through his figures the soul’s [immateriality] and immortality has made no [truly] beautiful works. Animal souls are Gérard’s province. He has [stopped] there; he has not reached his limits.

“The pose, the most important object of composition in [sculpture],” says Mr. B. Because it is through the pose that what one wishes to [express] is well or badly brought into full light.

Indeed, “affectation and grace” are very close and [risk] touching and merging, above all when “the subject” [is] “taken from a nature still tender.” (See the passage.) One must not [take] one for the other, either when creating or when judging.

[…]ardi, September 29.

— This great player of human chess!

September […]0.

Good sense — which comes from agriculture (and which wine harvests [favor]).

It is neither as they are nor as they ought to be that poets, painters, etc. strive to depict men and objects, but [as] they give pleasure; guided by their good taste more than by their [reflections].

October […].

— and That: in translating Tacitus one works on black. Quintus [Curtius] (for example) is a meadow that delights attention.

Spare the sight of young minds, brighten it.

October […]7.

God (you say) cannot deceive us. Well then, I say that, in order not to deceive us, he has proportioned truth to our intelligence, and that he really governs the world as it is easy and natural for us to imagine. (Through the ministry of angels.)

We willingly follow those who wish to lead us where we wish to go. This is what explains the ascendancy of so many orators and the vogue of so many books. They flattered the spirit of their century, the errors of the moment, the tastes or passions of the day.

To write in the air. Those who converse with one another with their fingers and through conventional alphabetic signs really write in the air and read in it, through memory, what has been written. Some draw in the air, these are the mimes.