At Le Cayla, July 10, 1832

It will soon be three and a half months since I came to the country, beneath my father’s roof, at home (that delightful English expression that contains the whole meaning of chez soi), at the heart of a beloved horizon. I have seen spring, and spring at large, free, released from every constraint, scattering flowers and greenery at its whim, running like a playful child through our valleys and over our hills, displaying sublime conceptions and graceful fancies, bringing genres together, harmonizing contrasts in the manner of great artists, or rather as an example to them. I have sat deep in the woods, beside streams, on the rounded backs of the hills; I have set my foot again wherever I placed it as a child, swiftly and with all the carefree ease of that age. Today I have planted it firmly; I have lingered over my earliest footprints; I have begun my pilgrimage anew with inward stillness and devotion, with the stillness of recollection and the soul’s devotion to its first impressions of landscape.

July 30, 1832

There are books one should read no more. I chose to reread René on one of the most disenchanted days of my life, when my heart seemed dead to me, a day of the most barren dryness, to test this book’s full power over a soul, and I learned that its power was great. This reading drenched my soul like rain from a thunderstorm.

I find infinite delight in returning to my early reading, my impassioned reading from sixteen to nineteen. I love to draw tears from the almost dry springs of my youth.

August 4, 1832

Today I complete my twenty-second year. I have often seen children in Paris being carried to their graves in tiny coffins, passing thus through the throng. Oh, if only I had passed through the world as they did, buried in the innocence of my coffin and in the oblivion of a life of a day! These little angels know nothing of the earth; they are born in heaven. My father told me that in my childhood he often saw my soul on my lips, ready to fly away. God and a father’s love kept it in the trial of life. Gratitude and love to them both! Yet I cannot help longing for the heaven where I would be, and which I can reach only by the slanting line of human life.

August 13, 1832

I am weak, very weak! How often, even since grace has been walking beside me, have I fallen like a child without leading strings! My soul is frail beyond anything one can imagine. It is the sense of my weakness that makes me seek shelter and gives me the strength to break with the world, so that I may remain more securely with God. Two days in the open air, in Paris, would exhaust all my resolutions. I must therefore hide them, bury them, place them in the shade of retreat. Now, of all the refuges open to souls that need to flee, none is more favorable to me than M. de Lamennais’s house, full of learning and piety.

When I think of it, I blush for my life, which I have so abused. I have blighted my humanity. Fortunately, my soul was divided in two; I have plunged only halfway into evil. While one half of myself crawled on the earth, the other, beyond the reach of any defilement, lofty and serene, gathered drop by drop that poetry which will burst forth, if God leaves me time. Everything lies there for me. I owe everything to poetry, since there is no other word to express the whole of my thoughts; I owe it all that remains pure, elevated, and sound in my soul; I owe it every consolation I have had; perhaps I shall owe it my future.

I feel that my friendship for L... is strong today, after passing through the extravagances of school and the delirium of our first emergence into the world. It is growing serious, like time, and sweet, like a fruit reaching maturity.