August 4, 1834

Paris is about to take hold of me again, but stronger, more courageous, better able in every way to endure the oppression of life there. During the six weeks I have spent here, without study, without effort, letting my soul go as it pleased, living as an idler, but a contemplative idler open to every impression, I have grown greatly. What does my mind need to enrich itself and gain in breadth? Books? Stubborn labor? Deep excavations into learning? No. A free life, a countryside which surrounds me with greenery and warm emanations, walks sometimes ardent and hurried, sometimes languid and slow, and all the light, clouds, ravishing sounds, universal delight that roll around a man who spends whole days leaning against a tree, occupied solely in watching nature live. My mind found itself placed in these conditions, and its own natural sap, warmed by the powerful atmosphere surrounding it, sent up a great shoot.

I have seen many clouds detach themselves from the mass of darkness weighing upon my soul, which has only lately begun to stir beneath the tardy breath of my intelligence. Every day I shed some prejudice. The love of liberty invades my character and begins to establish there a solid and reasoned independence which strengthens my footing within myself and prepares powers of resistance against the rude shocks of that wonderfully regulated and ordered combat called society. I am going to plunge into the fray; I do not know against whom I shall collide, but I am quite sure that bruises and wounds will rain upon me. What does it matter? A trifle disconcerts me, a breath knocks me over, a child governs my timidity; what will happen, then, when my existence finds itself bound to men bristling with prejudices, proud and absolute in their servile opinions, stiff, pompous, their hands always ready to bind the weak? They will disturb my timid nature, they will make me suffer horribly in the weak and unarmed parts of my soul; but their dart will bite nowhere else.

While they judge from appearances that I am defeated, my soul will lovingly press to itself, in the inward temple of independence, its free and generous opinions, its faith released from all the petty chains with which so many minds load it, saying to me: ‘Leave those men and their words behind, and temper yourself anew in the memory of the days of independence, when you ran as you pleased through the countryside, your heart swollen with delight, singing hymns to liberty at the top of your voice, or savored a lazy day from end to end, from the cheerful morning breezes to the warm perfumes of evening, lying beneath a pear tree, indifferent to everything and mocking, in your derisive idleness, the tyrants of every kind fastened like vultures to the flanks of humankind.’

Paris, August 20, 1834

To leave solitude for the crowd, green and deserted roads for crowded, clamorous streets where the only breeze is a current of hot and foul human breath; to pass from quietism to turbulent life, and from nature’s vague mysteries to the harsh reality of society, has always been for me a terrible exchange, a return to evil and unhappiness. As I go on, advancing in my discernment of truth and falsehood in society, my inclination to live, not as a savage or a misanthrope, but as a man of solitude at society’s boundaries, on the edges of the world, has strengthened and spread. Birds flit, peck, establish their nests around our dwellings; they are like fellow citizens of farms and hamlets; but they fly in the sky, which is immense; but God’s hand alone distributes and measures out their daily grain; but they build their nests in the heart of bushes or suspend them in the treetops. So would I like to live, roaming around society and always having behind me a field of freedom as vast as the sky. If my faculties are not yet stunted, if it is true that they have not reached their full growth, they will develop only in the open air, in a somewhat wild exposure. My last stay in the countryside redoubled my conviction on this point.

I spent my six weeks of holiday in the most complete inactivity. Scarcely, to break the uniformity of doing nothing, did I read a little, indolently, stretched beneath a tree; and even then more than half my attention was carried off by a breeze or a bird darting through the woods, by a blackbird’s or a lark’s song, or who knows what else? By everything vague and ravishing that passes through the air for a man lying on cool grass beneath a tree’s shelter, amid a countryside intoxicated with life and sunlight. But this rest, this lull, had not extinguished the play of my faculties or stopped the mysterious circulation of thought in the liveliest parts of my soul. I was like a man bound by magnetic sleep: his eyes are closed, his limbs relaxed, all his senses shut, but beneath this veil which covers almost all the phenomena of physical life, his soul is far more lively than in the state of waking and natural activity: it pierces thick darkness beyond which it sees certain mysteries laid bare, or enjoys the sweetest visions; it converses with apparitions, has the doors of a marvelous world opened for it. I tasted simultaneously two delights, either one of which would have sufficed to fill my whole being and more, yet both found room there and spread freely without fighting or merging. I enjoyed both at once, and each as distinctly as if I had possessed only one; no confusion, no mingling, no lessening of the liveliness of one by the activity of the other. The first consisted in the unspeakable feeling of a complete, continuous repose approaching sleep; the second came from the progressive, harmonious, slowly measured movement of my soul’s innermost faculties, which expanded in a world of dreams and thoughts that was, I believe, a kind of vision, in vague and fleeting shadows, of nature’s most secret beauties and her divine powers. When the hour of departure broke the spell, and I recovered the habitual feeling of my being, I found myself poor and deplorable as before; but in the livelier march of my thoughts, a subtler delicacy of sensation, a marked increase in my moral and intellectual powers, I recognized that my six weeks of idleness had not been lost, that the flood of strange dreams which had inundated my soul had lifted it and carried it higher. I returned to society with this joy, but it was amply counterbalanced and almost deadened by the sadness of my heart, which went away stricken with regret and languor. I parted from the countryside as from a beloved woman, and I confess that I cannot explain the astonishing resemblance between the sorrows she left me and those of love.

August 22, 1834

I received a letter from Onésime; as I opened it, a perfume of flowers and countryside rose from all its folds. At first I thought he had shut inside it one of those breezes which flit all day through meadows and gardens; but I soon thought better of it when, turning the page, I scattered blue and yellow petals, rose leaves, and blades of grass upon the floor. There were people in the drawing room; I blushed, stood quite abashed; I thought they would question me, perhaps mock what gave me so much pleasure. I would not have known what to answer, would have stammered, would have fallen into my difficulties with speech. Besides, how could I make alien natures understand the worth of a blade of grass in a letter, the charm of these touching childish things, these exquisite simplicities? Fortunately no one noticed; they were talking, I let them continue and hastened to gather up my treasure furtively, like a thief. Society, as it is constituted, has so altered men and destroyed in them the soul’s innocent instincts that those who have escaped the general contagion and preserved the simplicity of primitive tastes in its virgin purity are compelled to hide, to conceal themselves, to wrap themselves in a kind of modesty.

August 26, 1834

My soul contracts and curls upon itself like a leaf touched by cold; it withdraws to its own center, has abandoned every position from which it contemplated. After a few days of struggle against the reality of society, it has had to retreat and come back within. Here I am hemmed in and blockaded until my thought, swollen by a new flood, overtops the embankment and spreads freely upon all its shores. I know few inward occurrences as formidable for me as this sudden narrowing of being after an extreme expansion. In this condensation, the liveliest faculties, the most restless, most stirring elements, find themselves caught and condemned to inaction, but without paralysis, without diminution of life; all their ardor is shut in and constrained with them. Pressed and piled together, they struggle among themselves, and all together against the boundary. Then my whole feeling of life is reduced to a muffled, profound irritation mingled with shocks: it is the fermentation of so many different elements which grow hot and sour in their forced contact and repeat their attempts at eruption. All the faculties which put me in communication with the world outside, with what lies far away, those brilliant and faithful messengers of the soul which go and come continually from soul to nature and from nature to soul, being detained within, I remain isolated, cut off from all participation in universal life. I become like a man infirm and deprived of all his senses, solitary and excommunicated from nature.

September 7, 1834

I lose myself in conversations. Most often I take from them only dejection and bitterness. In them I compromise my inward life, what is best in me. To feed the discourse, I throw in my favorite thoughts, those I love most secretly and with the greatest solicitude. My timid, faltering speech disfigures them, mutilates them, casts them into broad daylight, disordered, confused, half naked. When I leave, I gather and clasp my scattered treasure, but what I put back within me are only bruised dreams, like fruits fallen from the tree onto stones.

September 9, 1834

At this moment there is a mixture in my soul, a mixture of bitterness and sweetness, a confusion of honey and gall, a strange jumble. For some days my mind, already so little governed, has been seized by a restless and ardent mobility which makes it go and come from one pole to the other, which no longer lets it settle and seat itself at the center of an order of ideas or beliefs, but carries it swiftly from region to region and, in passing, bends it over every abyss. I taste a strange delight in feeling my soul borne away like that prophet whom an angel carried off by the hair, traversing immense expanses at a fearful speed. But what do I gain from these unbridled journeys? Weariness, dazzle, increased vertigo, and yet, at the bottom of it all, a secret satisfaction of self-love which applauds the burning journey and quietly stimulates my soul’s budding passion for these perilous adventures. In the countryside, during those languid days, the abductor also came to take my soul; the two went very far away, but in a more tempered flight, through more serene regions, though just as vague and shifting. As today, my soul on its return no longer knew what to believe about anything, but there was less disturbance and anxious preoccupation in its perplexity.