Saturday, 1 December 1883

Am I not engaged in a fool's errand? Who will give me back my finest years, spent... perhaps in vain? But there is a good answer to these doubts of my vulgar self: I truly had nothing better to do; everywhere else, living as others do, I should have suffered too much... And besides, I should not have attained the moral development that renders me a superiority so very embarrassing... For myself. Stendhal at least had known one or two beings capable of understanding him, whereas I — it is frightening; everyone is flat, and those I took for people of intelligence seem to me stupid. Have I become what they call a misunderstood being? No — but all the same... It does seem to me that I have every right to be astonished and displeased when people think of me things of which I am incapable and which would wound my dignity, my delicacy, my very elegance... For instance, when Julian... someone comes to tell him that on the day of the prizes vote (last June) there was in the waiting crowd a very agitated young blonde woman who could not keep still, her hair blowing in the wind — and that he supposes it was me!! I appeal to anyone at all! I ask you! It seems to me a perfectly mad thing to suppose that I should have no shame in going there to wait for the result, to show myself... But it admits of no refutation! Well — in sum he is still my confidant, at intervals. As for a perfect equality of feeling — that does not exist unless one is in love, in which case it is love that works miracles. And yet is it not, on the contrary, this perfect equality that gives rise to Love? The soul-mate. I believe that image, so much abused, is perfectly apt. Well — where is this soul? Someone whose tip of the ear¹ one would never glimpse. [Words blackened: I have not yet] perceived it in Jules Bastien-Lepage — but if I see him five or six times... I shall certainly discover... Not a word, not a glance must be out of accord with the idea I have formed of him... It is not that I demand the unfindable perfection of a being with nothing human about him — but I require that his failings seem to me interesting failings and not demolish him in my eyes. Matching the dream — not the banal dream of impossible divinities, but in any case that everything about him please me... And that I not suddenly discover some stupid corner, or flat, or insufficient, or silly, or petty, or false, or self-interested; even the smallest of such blemishes is enough to destroy everything.