Chapter III

I think I have already written in my notes that love is very like torture or a surgical operation. But that idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even though two lovers are deeply smitten and filled with reciprocal desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or less enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or the hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do you hear those sighs, preludes of a tragedy of shame, those groanings, those cries, those throat-rattlings? Who has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly summoned them forth? And what worse do you find in the torments applied by painstaking torturers? Those faraway eyes of the somnambulist, those limbs the muscles of which twitch and grow taut as under the action of a galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their most infuriate consequences, surely yield no such frightful, no such curious examples. And the human countenance, which Ovid thought fashioned to reflect the stars, behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is spread in a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of decomposition.

Frightful play, in which one of the players must lose control of himself!

Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the greatest pleasure of love. Some one answered naturally: in receiving, and another: in giving one's self. The former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter: delight of humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation of Christ.--Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward to affirm that the greatest pleasure of love is to create citizens for the fatherland.

As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of love rests in the certainty of doing _evil_. Both man and woman know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss.

V

When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends have a secret desire to see him die; some, to establish the fact that his health is inferior to theirs; others, in the disinterested hope of studying an agony.

The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs..

VI

The man of letters rouses the capitals and conveys a taste for intellectual gymnastics.

We love women in proportion as they are strangers to us. To love intelligent women is a pleasure of the pederast. Thus bestiality excludes pederasty.

The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity; but that's rare.

Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease.

The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat.

VII

_Tragic sky_. Term of an abstract order applied to a material thing.

Man drinks light with the atmosphere. Thus they are right who say that the night air is not healthful for labor.

Man is born a fireworshipper.

Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.

If one imagine a born fireworshipper born a Parsee, one could create a story.

VIII

Misunderstanding of a countenance is the result of the eclipse of the real image by the hallucination born of it.

Know then the joys of a bitter life, and pray, pray ceaselessly. Prayer is a store-house of energy. (Altar of the will. Moral dynamics. The sorcery of the sacraments. Hygiene of the soul.)

Music deepens the sky.

Jean Jacques said that he could not enter a restaurant without a certain emotion. For a timid nature, a ticket office somewhat resembles the tribunal of hell.

Life has but one true attraction: the attraction of play. But if we care not whether we win or lose?

IX

Nations have great men only in spite of themselves--like families. They make every effort not to have them. Therefore, the great man must, in order to exist, possess an offensive force greater than the power of resistance developed by millions of individuals.

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we might say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.

X

There are tortoise-shell hides against which scorn is no longer a vengeance.

Many friends, many gloves.[1] Those who have admired me were despised, I might even say were despicable, if I sought to flatter honest men.

Girardin talk Latin! _Pecudesque locutae_.

He belongs to an infidel Society to send Robert Houdin to the Arabs to convert them from the miracles.

[Footnote 1: 'for fear of the itch' is added elsewhere.]

XI

These great, beautiful vessels, imperceptibly swaying (rocking) on the tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with their idle, homesick air, do they not ask us, in a silent tongue: When do we sail for happiness?

Not to forget the marvellous in drama, sorcery, romance.

The background, the atmosphere in which a whole tale should be steeped. (See the Fall of the House of Usher, and refer this to the profound sensations of hashish and of opium.)

XII

Are there mathematical insanities, and idiots who think that two and two make three? In other words, can hallucination, if the words do not cry out (at being coupled), invade the affairs of pure reason? If, when a man is sunk in habits of sloth, of revery, of idleness, to the point of constantly deferring the important thing to the morrow, another man were to wake him in the morning with biting lash, and were to whip him pitilessly until, unable to work for pleasure, he worked for fear, that man, that flogger, would he not be truly the friend, the benefactor? Besides, one might declare that pleasure would follow, much more justly than is said "Love comes after marriage."

Similarly, in politics, the true saint is he who lashes and destroys the people, for the people's good.

That which is not slightly deformed seems to lack feeling; whence it follows that irregularity, that is, the un-foreseen, surprise, astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.

XIII

Theodore de Banville is not exactly materialistic; he is luminous. His poetry represents happy hours.

For each letter from a creditor, write fifty lines on an abstract subject, and you are saved.

XV

Translation and paraphrase of the _Passion_. To refer everything to that.

Spiritual and physical joys born of the storm, thunder and lightning, tocsin of loving, shadowy memories, of years gone by.