May 23, 1833

We have managed to launch upon the pond an old boat which we pulled from the mud where it had lain buried for more than a year. It cost us much to repair, but we are well repaid for our trouble by the pleasure we take in our little voyages. This boat belonged to a Swedish ship. Who knows what seas it has traveled? Even had it gone around the world, it would rot just the same upon a little puddle of water.

June 12, 1833

These twenty days have passed miserably, so miserably that I have not had the courage to write a word here or elsewhere. The affliction seized me again with extreme violence and, as it were, brought me to the last extremity. It is comparable to the harshest suffering I have known in the past. A letter from Eugénie, which reached me at the height of the attack, did me great good, but the crisis had to run its course... My God and my good angel, have pity on me, preserve me from such sufferings!

June 13, 1833

Without the greenery, one would think it December. The fine season has gone away I know not where. The sun will lose its name here; it is cold enough to make one shiver. This cursed west wind has invaded the sky with its countless flocks of clouds and floods us with rain. One might think winter were passing up there with its sad procession. Nothing is more distressing than the contrast between the green earth, that carpet so rich, so marvelously varied which spring has spread over the earth’s surface to place her lovely feet upon it, and the vault of heaven all blackened by rain clouds. I picture a wedding celebrated in a church hung with black. Oh, besides, even on the finest days, what a difference between Brittany’s sky and that of our South! Here summer, on its days of solemn splendor, always has something sad, veiled, confined. It is like a miser going to some expense; there is stinginess in its magnificence. Long live our Languedoc sky, so generous in light, so blue, so broadly arched!

June 15, 1833

Strange dream! I dreamed I was alone in a vast cathedral. I was there under the impression of God’s presence, in that state of soul in which one is conscious only of God and oneself, when a voice arose. This voice was infinitely sweet, a woman’s voice, and yet it filled the whole church as a great concert might have done. I recognized it at once; it was L...’s voice, silver-sweet sounding.

June 19, 1833

Three nights running, the same figure has appeared to me. What is one to think of that?

June 23, 1833

‘I clearly feel that I am a poor creature with little intelligence.’ Oh, how well said, my dear Bernardin! How well you have conveyed the feeling of a soul one strives to raise above its sphere and which, penetrated by its own powerlessness, cries out: I clearly feel that I am a poor creature, as you make Virginie say. I have been repeating these words to myself for a long time; they sum up all my labors, all my life. Oh, if I were poor only in that respect, it might still be borne; but my poverty is almost universal, yes, universal, and I shall never draw much good from my head, not for myself, but for those who have the right to expect something of me. That is what desolates me. I have taken the wrong road. I might have done something useful by taking an entirely opposite direction. It is impossible to carry these experiments farther than I have done. The one I am now completing will leave no room for reply. After that, who could say what will become of me? The invisible thread of Providence will always draw me toward the best course.

June 28, 1833

I have many things to say; let us go to the most pressing. There is an irritation here that wishes to speak and make its way out through everything else. I have suffered so much in my soul that I ought to be proof against pinpricks, if the soul were like the body, which hardens under blows like iron beneath the hammer. But with the soul it is quite the reverse. I would earnestly wish...

July 4, 1833

I have received the final blow. Here I am, well and duly found guilty and convicted of the heaviest blunder imaginable. I regard this affair as a judgment without appeal, and so much the better in one respect: it will teach me at last to value myself at what I am worth. The rate of my valuation is henceforth fixed, and by experts. That is what comes of listening to vain thoughts: I kept telling myself that sooner or later harm would come of it; I laughed at myself, played the braggart, and today here I am driven shamefully back within my lines. Oh, I swear by what I have suffered and by the respect I owe my soul that this is my last sortie. I wish to barricade myself at home, wall myself in to remove every temptation, moving no more than a boundary statue, even if I must wither where I stand. I read somewhere that thousands of animalcules swim at ease within a drop of water; the circumference of my intellectual domain is, I believe, about equal to that of the drop, and I am alone within it: have I not reason to be happy, without further troubling my repose with dreams of ambition? Oh yes, my little world, my little imperceptible droplet, you belong to me alone, and henceforth I shall belong to you alone. If some living being as tiny as I am happens to ask me to let him enter, I shall gladly offer hospitality, receive him warmly, full of gratitude for the sympathy that led him to knock at my door; I shall take him through my whole dwelling, laying every detail open to his curiosity as one would a palace; we shall talk delightedly of a thousand little, little things, which will be great matters for us: happiness, sorrows, labors, discoveries, philosophy, poetry, all will enter our conversations, but in proportions suited to the infinitely narrow extent of our conceptions and the smallness of our souls. After indulging to our hearts’ content in talk and friendship, I shall lead my guest back to the door and, leaving him a kiss and a farewell (two touching things that go together), slide the bolts and keep quiet within my microscopic universe until the knocker tells me once more that outside there is a thought thinking of me.

July 17, 1833

Yesterday I saw the swallows flying in the clouds, a sign of clear weather that did not deceive me. I write at the decline of a beautiful day, brilliant and warm, after a month and a half of clouds and cold; but this beautiful sun, which usually does me so much good, passed over me like an extinguished star; it left me as it found me, cold, frozen, insensible to every outward impression, suffering barren and miserable trials in what little of me still lives. My inward life wastes away each day; I sink into some abyss I cannot name, and I must already have reached a great depth, for light scarcely reaches me any longer, and I feel the cold gaining on me. Oh, I know well what drags me down; I have always said it and shall say it today more loudly than ever as I fall: it is the desolating conviction of my powerlessness, it is that fatal powerlessness, a truth whose seed I brought here, and which grew so much during these eight months that at last it overwhelmed me, threw me down, and hurled me into a fall whose limits I do not know. Yes, I am falling, that is certain, for I no longer see what I saw, I no longer feel what I felt.

August 1, 1833

For some time, like a converted sinner, I have been striving to love what I hated and hate what I loved. I have solemnly renounced poetry, contemplation, my whole ideal life. I have promised myself to live very peacefully within a little world of my own making, from which I have banished all the beautiful phantoms that crowded the one I inhabited before. I thought an existence circumscribed within a very narrow circle of reality, confined like an ant in a little hole dug in the sand, would be better for me than these adventurous, barren excursions of my thought into a world from which I am decidedly repelled. But alas, it is written that my poor imagination will have nowhere to rest here below. This little corner I chose for it among realities, so that it might fall asleep there, rejects it as the ideal sphere did. What is to become of me in this suspension between two spheres, in this region where thought remains suspended only because both repel it equally?

August 12, 1833

I return here now only at long intervals, because gentle, expansive hours return to me only from time to time. Such cold has seized my soul that everything falling into it grows numb at once. I do not know what paralysis has struck me; I do not know what indifference, a hundred times more painful than the most nervous sensitivity, makes me pass entire weeks without attending to anything.

August 14, 1833

After a long succession of brilliant days, I rather like to find, one fine morning, the sky hung with gray, and all nature resting, as it were, from her festival days in a melancholy calm. That is exactly how it is today. An immense, motionless veil, without the smallest fold, covers the whole face of the sky; the horizon wears a crown of bluish vapors; not a breath in the air. All the sounds rising in the distant countryside reach the ear thanks to this silence: a plowman’s songs, children’s voices, little cries and refrains of animals, and from time to time a dog barking I know not where and cocks answering one another like sentinels. Within me, too, everything is calm and at rest. A gray and somewhat sad veil has spread over my soul, as the peaceful clouds have over nature. A great silence has settled, and I hear something like the voices of a thousand sweet and moving memories, rising in the distance of the past and coming to murmur in my ear.