Mme de Staël. Mystical — the inmost recesses of the mind. Everything that depicts them has something mystical about it. But nonreligious mysticism displeases. To make itself intelligible, it needs to turn to the other kind, as, for example: “What one knows well gives the mind a rest that resembles the satisfaction of conscience...” (See passim.) Yes, for someone who makes a religion of his knowledge... What a comparison? Someone who has the satisfaction of conscience feels that he is worth more in God’s eyes, but someone who has “knowing well what one knows” is worth more only in his own eyes. This nonreligious mystical quality always has something erroneous about it. Outside religion, one must express nothing too intimate, unless it has more to do with the depths of the heart than with those of the mind, and even then I do not know. (Erroneous, false and disagreeable.)

One could therefore also say: — Having much money in one’s pocket or coffers gives foresight a tranquility that resembles etc... How horrible! or at least how unseemly!

Thus, philosophical and quasi-physiological mystical quality: false and displeasing mystical quality.

All this is painting the viscera, like Zumbo. Let us not paint human viscera. Nor even the entrails of anything, although the Latins say: from the entrails of the thing.

December 22.

Refinement of style. Almost everyone excels at it today. It has become a common art. In a word, the exquisite is everywhere, the satisfying nowhere. “I would like to smell manure,” said a witty woman.

The people do not like others to resemble them; they despise intemperance and hate their own vices in the great. But they love (especially in kings) a goodness resembling their own. For their own is the best, just as their vices are the worst.

There is too much milk and sugar in everything he does, or, if you prefer, too much nectar and ambrosia. Taste has its fill there; judgment feeds on air; there is nothing there simple enough for reason, which is a very sober faculty; dishes so sweet force it to remain fasting.

Salons are academic halls and even schools. One does not converse there; one argues. The speaker, with his back to the fire, is there as though in a pulpit. The listener is there on the benches, though seated in a good armchair; every subject serves there as a thesis.

One is judged there. One takes one’s degrees there. One lectures there when the dice of dispute bring the opportunity. One sees there doctors, teachers of every dress and every sex, of every age, every country, every system.

The good taste of countinghouses reigns there. Polemic governs everything there. For figures of rhetoric one has those of the syllogism in all their varieties; calculation dominates there. Beauties are assigned there, and literary values are appraised by the same spirit that makes bankers.