December 20, 1833

I do not believe I have ever felt the happiness of family life with such intimacy and inward attention. Never has that perfume which circulates through every room of a pious and happy house enveloped me so completely. It is like a cloud of invisible incense which I breathe without cease. All those small details of intimate life whose sequence constitutes the day are for me so many shades of a continuous enchantment unfolding from one end of the day to the other. The morning greeting, renewing in a sense the pleasure of the first arrival, for the form of words with which we approach one another is almost the same, and besides the night’s separation resembles longer separations closely enough, being, like them, full of dangers and uncertainty; breakfast, the meal in which we immediately celebrate the happiness of finding one another again; the walk that follows, a kind of greeting and adoration we go to offer nature, for in my opinion, after worshiping God directly in morning prayer, it is good to go and bend a knee before that mysterious power which he has given over to the secret adoration of a few men; our return and our enclosure within a room paneled entirely in the old manner, looking onto the sea, inaccessible to household noise, in a word, a true sanctuary of work; dinner, announced not by the sound of a bell, which recalls school or a great house too strongly, but by a gentle voice calling us from below; the gaiety, the lively jests, the conversations broken into a thousand pieces which float ceaselessly over the table throughout the meal; the crackling fire of dry branches around which we draw our chairs after that sign of the cross which carries our thanksgiving to heaven; the sweet things said in the warmth of the fire which murmurs as we talk, and, if the sun shines, the walk beside the sea, which sees a mother approaching, her child in her arms, that child’s father and a stranger, these two with sticks in their hands; the little lips of the little girl speaking at the same time as the waves, sometimes the tears she sheds and the cries of childish pain upon the seashore, our own thoughts as we see the mother and child smiling at one another, or the crying child and the mother trying to soothe her with the gentleness of her caresses and voice, and the Ocean always rolling its train of waves and sounds; the dead branches we cut in the coppice to light a quick, lively fire on our return; this little woodcutter’s labor bringing us nearer nature through immediate contact and reminding me of M. Féli’s ardor for the same work; the hours of study and poetic outpouring carrying us as far as supper; that meal calling us with the same gentle voice and passing in the same joys as dinner, though a little less brilliant, because evening veils everything, tempers everything; the evening opening with the brightness of a joyful fire and, from reading to reading, from conversation to conversation, passing away into sleep; to all the charms of such a day add I know not what angelic radiance, I know not what enchantment of peace, freshness, and innocence, spread by the fair head, the blue eyes, the silvery voice, the little feet, the little steps, the laughter, the little intelligent pouts of a child who, I am sure, makes more than one angel envious, who enchants you, beguiles you, makes you lose your head with a slight movement of her lips, so much power is there in weakness! Add everything your imagination will tell you, and you will still be far from having touched the depths of all those secret delights.

December 21, 1833

For some days the weather has been at its worst. Rain falls and wind blows in gusts, but with such fury that everything seems about to be swept away as prey to those fearful squalls. For three nights running I have been awakened with a start by one of those squalls which pass regularly around midnight. They assault the house so furiously that everything inside is set trembling and shivering. I half rise upon my bed and listen to the hurricane passing, and a thousand thoughts which slept, some at the surface, others in the deepest part of my soul, stir and rise. All the sounds of nature, the winds, those formidable breaths of an unknown mouth, which set playing the innumerable instruments disposed in plains, upon mountains, in the hollows of valleys, or gathered in masses in forests; the waters, which possess a scale of voices of such immoderate range, from the rustling of a spring in moss to the Ocean’s immense harmonies; thunder, the voice of that sea floating above our heads, the rustling of dry leaves when a man or a wandering breeze passes; finally, for one must stop somewhere in this enumeration which would be infinite, that continuous, universal emission of sounds, that ever-floating murmur of the elements expands my thought into strange reveries and casts me into astonishments from which I cannot recover. Nature’s voice has even gained such dominion over me that I rarely manage to free myself from the habitual preoccupation she imposes, and I try in vain to turn a deaf ear. But to awaken at midnight to the cries of the storm, to be assailed in darkness by a wild and furious harmony which overturns night’s peaceful empire: that is something incomparable in the way of strange impressions; it is delight within terror.