Chapter XXI

Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility, that is one's genius.

By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys of a young household.

The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the odor of fur with the odor of woman. I remember.... Finally, I loved my mother for her elegance. Thus I was a precocious dandy.

The Protestant countries lack two elements essential to the happiness of a well-bred man: gallantry and devotion.

The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleasing to the mind, as discords to blasé ears.

What is intoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.

Germany expresses meditation by line, as England by perspective.

There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a nervous shock that is felt in the cerebellum.

Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to love.

STYLE.--The eternal note, the eternal and cosmopolitan style. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.

Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine. The cat is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of cleanliness, of voluptuousness, etc.

XXII

A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, yields three hundred and sixty-five times a little money, that is, an enormous sum. _At the same time fame is won._

To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to create a pounced drawing.

My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please her.

XXIII

To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean?

What more absurd than progress since man, as is proven by everyday fact, is always like and equal to man, that is to say, always in the savage state! What are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnare his dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in unknown forests, is he not eternal man, i.e., the most perfect beast of pray?

They say I am thirty years of age; but if I have lived three minutes in one..., am I not ninety?

... Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed souls?