To [refine] one’s mind, or make it finer without making it less strong, [less] sound.

Truth. (And see elsewhere.) It is not always necessary, and it is [often] useless, for her accessories to be true, that is to say, to be [her very self]. It is enough that they can adorn her and make her more [present] to us and more apt to touch the heart.

March […].

To be sparing of wind with French heads, and choose it, for all winds turn [them]. Monsoons or regular winds. Wind that has [blown] constantly for ten centuries. Moreover, the ideas that [favor] passions in motion are always those that [predominate]. And to attack these ideas, one must attack these passions.

Of what is false at bottom and seems true on the surface. To judge it [well], one must judge it by taste.

Enthusiasm is always calm, always slow, and remains inward. Explosion is not enthusiasm and does not come from [enthusiasm] properly so called, but from a more violent state. [Enthusiasm] acts in spirals. We carry it in our entrails, and it [follows] them and it conforms to them in everything.

March […]9.

Of light. Dry light, moist light, warm light. (It is less clear, but has much more effect.) [Cold] light. This is the light of artificial elegance, which comes from skill [without] genius and taste without enthusiasm.

Lafontaine. It is he whose taste is never without enthusiasm; [nor] is Fontanes’s either, in the verses he made despite himself.

[Translation.] Mme Dacier’s is too bourgeois, and Monsieur Bitaubé’s too—I do not say academic, for it is not, but oratorically and grammatically pedantic.

March 31.

Outside domestic affections, all lasting feelings are impossible for the French.