Ennui and aversion

Use in the book

The school memoir opposes education’s intended nourishment to the enormous mass of ennui its fragmentary methods have produced. Boredom is there an indictment of a system, not a confession that learning itself lacks value. On Good Friday the same word enters a different setting. Guérin is bored during retreat, gnaws at unnamed thoughts, and becomes bitter toward devotional exercises. He describes this as spiritual rebellion because natural sweetness attracts him while religious concentration fails.

By April 1835 aversion has acquired a more bodily and kinetic force. Work provokes an acrid, nervous dégoût that sends him into streets and public squares. A few days later ennui is among the factors associated with oppressive sensations in his head. These passages connect affect, physical discomfort, and working conditions without making them identical. To translate all of them as mere boredom would lose both the moral conflict of the retreat and the later experience of almost intolerable repulsion. Equally, imposing a uniform spiritual meaning would efface the specific failures of education and labor.

Places to read

1. 6 February 1833 · ¶1A mass of ennui is the bitter residue of ten years’ disconnected classical teaching.
2. 5 April 1833 · ¶2Boredom and aversion arise within prescribed retreat and are judged against Good Friday’s demands.
3. 3 April 1835 · ¶1Acrid, nervous aversion prevents application and drives movement through the city.
4. 8 April 1835 · ¶1Ennui enters a list of circumstances associated with distressing bodily sensations.

Translation in this edition

The English distinguishes “boredom” and “grow bored” from the retreat’s “aversions.” This differentiation is valuable: dégoût is not simply a stronger quantity of ennui but often a movement of rejection.

Use in the book

At the monks’ graves René exclaims at the disgust for earth their tombs inspire (p. 148). He nevertheless abandons the monastic possibility for travel. The sentence describes a strong feeling without demonstrating a settled vocation. After returning to society he becomes increasingly disgusted with things and men because he believes he must diminish himself to fit them (p. 157). His judgement may record real alienation while also protecting a high estimate of his own inward worth.

At the cottage the ‘disgust with life’ felt since childhood returns with fresh strength (p. 164). Its scope is now existential; bodily languor and ennui accompany it, and the resolve to die follows. Amélie’s intervention refuses to treat this state as only a private matter: ‘your disgusts, your injustices’ binds distress to his suspicions of her and to the harm his projected death would inflict (p. 166). Her rebuke and care arrive together.

The omitted 1802 account says early Christian persecutions increased disgust for the things of life (Appendix I no. 1). Thus the religious history that helps explain René’s temperament partly shares its language with the moral diagnosis that condemns him. Souël’s closing argument supplies a practical distinction: withdrawal that wastes powers and abandons others differs from religious discipline and service. The text does not solve the problem by reserving dégoût exclusively for one side.

René’s changing aversions also expose a temporal paradox. The Preface calls perpetual inconstancy a constant disgust: objects change while rejection persists. The stability lies in the refusal itself, which outlasts each attempted remedy and makes novelty unable to deliver its promised renewal.

Places to read

1. p. 148dégoût de la terre — Monastic tombs prompt aversion to earthly life, though René does not stay in the monastery.
2. p. 157dégoûté de plus en plus des choses et des hommes — The aversion expands across the social world in René’s own account.
3. p. 164Ce dégoût de la vie — The return of an early disposition precedes the suicidal crisis.
4. p. 166tes dégoûts, tes injustices — Amélie connects inward aversion to the treatment of other people.
5. Preface p. 10la perpétuelle inconstance, qui n'est qu'un dégoût constant — The theoretical extract finds a recurring structure beneath apparent changefulness.

Translation in this edition

The translation consistently chooses ‘disgust’, not the weaker ‘distaste’. At p. 148, 1802 has ‘de quelle philosophie mélancolique’ where 1826 has ‘de quel dégoût de la terre’. The supplied witnesses establish a lexical replacement; its exact revision date remains undetermined.