February 17, 1834

O purity of the fields! I was forever ascending from nature to God, and descending again from God to nature. That was my inward life, mingled with a few melancholy feelings, a few tremors of the heart, which only softened or hastened the course of my thoughts without altering them. Nothing sullied entered my soul, and I felt the powers of my mind increasing; for when the inward man is pure, his thought rises without hindrance and draws ever nearer to the source of all intellectual strength. I was beginning to master my discouragements and to gain that fine and noble confidence of a heart which feels itself God’s friend, and cannot lose courage so long as it rests upon that feeling.

March 16, 1834

Something very strange is happening within me now. Perhaps I have never received stronger proofs of my intellectual powerlessness than in these last few weeks, and I go on my way as though nothing were amiss; I fearlessly write quantities of articles which are accepted, by what miracle I do not know, in a small newspaper. In truth I do not know which to admire more: the excessive kindness of the men who welcome such poor attempts, or my incredible assurance in launching such follies into the world. Where does this extreme courage come from? Oh! I may acknowledge to myself the feeling which inspires it; this one is pure, it is praiseworthy, and it happens so seldom that I can look one of my thoughts in the face without having to lower my eyes that I must record here the one which gives me such unaccustomed energy. I work solely for my father and my friends; all my strength lies in them, and it is not I who work, but they who work within me. It is true that for three years they wasted their efforts pushing and spurring me on, and that there was enough in this to make me die of shame and remorse, if my soul could raise a feeling, repentance for example, to any degree of energy.

March 23, 1834

Oh! Let me hasten, then, to hold here as much as I can of the raptures of this day; let me hasten to write that on this day I have known the most sublime happiness, that of a man who glimpses something of the delights of heaven; that I have felt myself powerful for good and full of love for God and men. Yes, I must hasten to write it, for these noble exaltations last but briefly in my soul, for tomorrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It seems unbearable to me to appear before men as someone other than one is before God. My harshest torment at this moment is the esteem in which noble souls hold me. It is said that at the Last Judgment the secrets of conscience will be revealed to the whole universe: I wish it were so for me this very day, and that the sight of my soul were open to all who come.

April 20, 1834

O my notebook, you are not for me a heap of paper, something unfeeling, inanimate; no, you are alive, you have a soul, intelligence, love, goodness, compassion, patience, charity, pure and unchanging sympathy. You are for me what I have not found among men: that tender and devoted being who attaches itself to a weak and sickly soul, surrounds it with affection, alone understands its language, divines its heart, shares its sorrows, is intoxicated by its joys, lets it rest upon its breast, or at times bends over it to rest in turn; for it is a great consolation to the one we love to lean upon them for sleep or rest. I need a love like that, a love of compassion. I have nothing which could awaken for me one of those loves so often seen in the world, a love of equal for equal, a love of kindred souls, souls which go toward one another because each has seen the other great and beautiful, like two stars which, having caught sight of one another at opposite ends of the heavens, would cross space to meet. To be loved as I am, I would need to encounter a soul willing to bend toward one beneath it, a strong soul which would kneel before the weaker, not to worship it, but to serve it, console it, guard it, as one does for someone ill; a soul, in short, endowed with a sensitivity as humble as it is deep, which would strip itself sufficiently of the pride so natural even to love to bury its heart in an obscure affection the world would not understand, to devote its life to a feeble, languishing, wholly inward being, to resolve to concentrate all its rays upon a flower without brilliance, frail and forever trembling, which would indeed return those perfumes whose sweetness charms and penetrates, but never those which intoxicate and exalt to the happy madness of rapture.

May 1, 1834

Always a burden, always compelled to borrow my existence. A newborn child’s lips have strength enough to suck the breast, and I, in the full vigor of youth, have not enough strength to earn my subsistence, to draw in a little life.

May 7, 1834

Gentle rain. — There was not a breath in the air. The rain fell peacefully, with a monotony not without charm. The foliage bowed beneath the water from heaven, and every drop, striking the leaves, gave them a little oscillation which began again without cease. It was as though a general shiver had seized the masses of greenery, a tremor of joy and delight. The air, steeped in warm moisture and laden with all the perfumes of May, induced languor and almost dulled the senses through its softness and warm scents.

Now all my conversations with nature, that other comforter of the afflicted, take place in a small garden in the Rue d’Anjou-Saint-Honoré, quite near the Rue de la Pépinière. The evening before last, I had put my arm around a lilac trunk and was singing softly: Que le jour me dure, by J. J. That touching and melancholy air, my posture, the stillness of evening, and more than all these, my soul’s habit of gathering up all its sorrows at evening, of surrounding itself with pale clouds toward the end of the day, cast me into a deep, intimate, immense sense of my misery, my inward poverty. I saw myself as poor, very poor, pitiable, and entirely incapable of a future. At the same time I seemed to hear stirring above my head, very high, very far away, that world of thought and poetry toward which I so often soar without ever being able to reach it. I thought of those my age who have wings enough to arrive there, but without jealousy, and as we look from here below upon the blessed and their happiness. Yet my soul burned, panted, struggled against its powerlessness. There was in it something of the despair and fruitless surges of passion of those unhappy beings who can only dream of love and, in their dreams, press a burning phantom deliriously against their breast. The lilac stem I clasped stirred beneath my arm; I thought I felt it move of itself, and all its shivering leaves made a gentle sound which seemed to me like speech, like the murmur of lips stammering words of consolation. O my lilac, at that moment I held you as the only being in this world against which I could lean my faltering nature, as the only one able to endure an embrace from me, and compassionate enough to become the support of my misery! How did I repay you? With a few tears that fell upon your root.

May 18, 1834

My inward misery spreads; I no longer dare look within myself.

May 25, 1834

I shall doubtless be blamed; but is it in my power to express anything other than what I feel? The experiments accumulate; there is no longer any room for doubt. I have no refuge left but resignation. When I set foot upon the first step of my attempts and trials, I foresaw that I would count myself happy to find, after going through them all, not a place of modest extent in which to establish my life and breathe at ease, but a little hole in which to huddle and remain still until the end. My prediction has been fulfilled to the letter: I have no other shelter now than resignation, and I flee to it in great haste, trembling and distraught. Resignation is the burrow dug beneath the roots of an old oak or in a cleft of rock, which shelters the fleeing prey, long pursued. It slips quickly through the narrow, dark opening, hides in the farthest depths, and there, crouched and huddled upon itself, its heart pounding redoubled blows, listens to the distant barking of the pack and the hunters’ cries. Here I am in my burrow. But once the danger has passed, the prey returns to the fields, goes to see the sun and freedom again; it returns joyfully to its carpet of wild thyme and savory grasses, which it left half grazed, and resumes the habits of its wandering, wild life. The grain, the vines, the coppices, the bushes, the flowers, its bed in a tuft of grass or in moss beneath a thicket, its sleeps, its dreams, its vague and gentle existence, all belong to it again; while I, frightened for a long time to come, shall no longer go out, shall remain forever confined to my underground dwelling. Must I complain of this? Why should I? In the depths of my hiding place I find safety, a certain calm, and as much room as my soul needs for its little movements. A soft and subtle ray of light slips into my home and keeps it about as bright as a bee’s cell. If the wind brings me from time to time a few breaths of wild perfume, and my ear catches some distant strains of nature’s melodies, what shall I have to regret? Does the spider swaying at evening on its thread between two leaves trouble itself about the eagle’s flight and the wings of all the birds? And does the imagination of the bird brooding upon its nestlings, well sheltered beneath a bush, regret the whims of its freedom and the gentle undulations of its flight high in the air? I have never had the bird’s freedom, nor has my thought been as happy as its wings: let us fall asleep in resignation like the bird upon its nest.