December 20, 1833

I have never tasted the happiness of family life with such intimacy and inward stillness. Never has that perfume circulating through every room of a pious, happy house enveloped me so completely. It is like a cloud of invisible incense which I breathe without ceasing. All those small details of intimate life whose linked succession makes up the day are for me so many shades of a continuous charm 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 uncertainties; 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; 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 to us not by the sound of a bell, which recalls school or a great house too strongly, but by a gentle voice; the gaiety, the lively jests, the undulating conversations floating ceaselessly throughout the meal; the crackling fire of dry branches around which we draw our chairs immediately afterward; the sweet things said in the warmth of the flame 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 girl’s rosy lips 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 consider 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; the Ocean always rolling its train of waves and sounds; the dead branches we cut as we go here and there through the coppice, to light a quick, lively fire on our return; this little woodcutter’s labor bringing us nearer nature and reminding us of M. Féli’s singular 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 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 some angelic radiance, some enchantment of peace, freshness, and innocence, which I cannot name, spread by the fair head, the blue eyes, the silvery voice, 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! To all this add, finally, the dreams of imagination, and you will still be far from attaining the measure of all those intimate felicities.

December 21, 1833

For several days the weather has been at its worst. Rain falls and the wind blows in gusts, but with such fury that everything seems about to become prey to these dreadful squalls. Three nights running I have been startled awake by one of those storms that pass regularly toward midnight. They deliver such a furious assault upon the house that everything is set trembling and shivers within. I half rise in my bed and listen to the hurricane pass, and a thousand thoughts which slept, some upon the surface, others in the deepest part of my soul, stir and rise.

All the sounds of nature: the winds, those formidable breaths from an unknown mouth, setting in motion the countless instruments arranged upon the plains, upon the mountains, in the hollows of valleys, or gathered in masses within the forests; the waters, possessing a scale of voices of such immeasurable extent, from the rustling of a spring in the moss to the Ocean’s immense harmonies; thunder, the voice of that sea floating above our heads; the brushing of dry leaves, if a man or a wandering breeze happens to pass; finally, for one must stop somewhere in this enumeration which would be infinite, this continual outpouring of sounds, this ever-floating murmur of the elements, expand my thought into strange reveries and cast me into astonishments from which I cannot recover. Nature’s voice has gained such dominion over me that I rarely manage to free myself from the habitual preoccupation it imposes, and try in vain to turn a deaf ear. But to awaken at midnight to the storm’s cries, to be assailed in darkness by a wild and furious harmony overturning night’s peaceful empire, is something incomparable among strange impressions; it is delight within terror.