He was to become a teacher. By the time he was nineteen he had given up this idea. His father was sending him a small allowance. For the next few years—interrupted by a year’s military service—he lived on that, supplemented rather painfully by odd clerking and tutoring jobs. He ghost-wrote a book on furniture. Meanwhile, he kept on writing short stories, only one of which was published—unpaid—at the time. He frequented literary cafés and certain newspaper milieux. All young men aspiring to a name in letters wrote poetry, and young Renard managed to publish, at his own expense, a collection of fairly banal verse, which he called Les Roses.

He was a country boy. His accent was not quite the accent of Paris, and his features were rough-hewn, but he was ambitious, and already wore the top hat and carried the elegant walking stick of the boulevardier he was to become. He must have had more than ordinary attractiveness, because, although he was penniless, his amie was a young actress of the Comédie Française, who tirelessly recited his poems in salons. (His inevitable break with her became, nine years later, the subject of his first and highly successful play, Le Plaisir de Rompre). He was also enthusiastically received in the homes of rich bourgeois reaching out for culture—a situation he later described in his novel L’Ecornifleur—“The Sponger” (1892).

He was desperately trying to find a stable situation, of almost any nature, and was even considering, much against his inclination, a post of schoolteacher in Algeria, when he met Mlle Marie Morneau. Her antecedents were undistinguished, but she was seventeen, pretty, and, by all accounts—not only Jules Renard’s—gifted with a disposition almost Biblical in its selflessness. She, too, must have felt the attractiveness of the young Renard, for she not only married him, but brought him as part of her dot a narrow house on the Rue du Rocher, which became their Paris home, and a personal fortune of 300,000 francs.

Jules Renard continued for a while his part-time tutoring and other odd jobs, but he could from now on give himself over to finding his footing as an homme de lettres.

He began keeping the Journal in 1887, a year before he married. Where events of interest were left out of his entries—and at first the Journal was really a writer’s notebook—we have indicated them in a note at the beginning of the year in which they occurred.

—Elizabeth Roget

1887

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live.

Jules Renard began his Journal this year, at the age of twenty-three.

The heavy sentence—as though weighted with electric fluids—of Baudelaire.

A bird enveloped in mist, as though bringing with it fragments of cloud torn with its beak.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.

AUGUST

Sea foam. The tide seems to burst, like a muffled, distant explosion of which we should be seeing only the smoke.

SEPTEMBER

The true artist will write in, as it were, small leaps, on a hundred subjects that surge unawares into his mind. In this way, nothing is forced. Everything has an unwilled, natural charm. One does not provoke: one waits.

A scrupulous inexactness.

OCTOBER

Haughty, silent faces should not deceive us: these are the timid ones.

I have an almost incessant need of speaking evil of others; but no interest at all in doing evil to them.

It is a fascinating task to disentangle, in a young writer, the influences of the established ones. How hard we work before we help ourselves, quite simply, to our own originality!

How odd is the world of dreams! Thoughts, inner speech crowd and swarm—a little world hastening to live before the awakening that is its end, its particular death.

We often wish we could exchange our natural family for a literary one of our choice, in order that we might call the author of a moving page “brother.”

On waking from a tender dream, we strive to go to sleep again in order to continue it, but we try in vain to seize its outlines as they disappear, like the folds of a beloved woman’s dress, behind a curtain we cannot brush aside.

NOVEMBER

To lie watching one’s mind, pen raised, ready to spear the smallest thought that may come out.

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live.

Fresh, transparent air, in which the light looks washed, as though it had been dipped in clear water and then, like pieces of fine gauze, hung out to dry.

A style that’s vertical, glittering, without seams.

Sometimes everything around me seems so diffuse, so tremulous, so little solid, that I imagine this world to be only the mirage of a world to come: its projection.