All you see is its head, purple and puffy. Babies have been seen wearing three bonnets.

The grandmother knits near the stove, in list slippers: wooden shoes are always kept at a good distance from the slippers. She sits with crossed legs. Attached to her free-hanging foot, and coming from the rocking cradle, is a string consisting of a piece of real string, the edging off a dress, and a piece of faded braid.

The scholar generalizes, the artist individualizes.

The blackbird, that minuscule crow.

Men of nature, as they are called, do not spend much time talking about nature.

Poets of the decadent school—the décadents—are reproached for their obscurity. This is not a valid criticism. What is there to understand in a line of verse? Absolutely nothing. Poetry is not an exercise from the Latin. I love Lamartine, but the music of his verse satisfies me. One does not gain much by peering under the words. There is little enough to find there. And one cannot demand of music that it have meaning, much meaning. Lamartine and the décadents agree on this point. They only consider form. The décadents make a little more fuss about it, that is all.

It should be forbidden, under penalty of a fine or even imprisonment, for a modern writer to borrow similes from mythology, to talk of harps, of lyres, of muses, of swans. Storks might pass.

The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.

FEBRUARY

One can well believe that the eyes of the newborn, those eyes that do not see and into which one finds it difficult to look, contain a little of the abyss from which they come.

A simple man, a man who has the courage to have a legible signature.

MARCH

The mother-in-law.1

“Yes, maman.”

“In the first place, I am not your mother, and I have no use for your fine manners.”

She would forget to set a place at table for her daughter-in-law, or would give her a dirty fork, or, when wiping the table, would purposely leave crumbs in front of her. In an extremity, she would heap all the crumbs in front of her. No means of annoyance was too small.

She could be heard saying: “Ever since this stranger has come, nothing goes right any more.” And this stranger was the wife of her son. Her rage was further inflamed by the affection the father-in-law showed for the young woman. When she had to pass by her, she would draw herself together, pressing her arms against her sides, and flatten herself against the wall as though afraid of being dirtied. She would heave great sighs, and declare that if grief really killed she’d be dead. She would even spit to express her disgust.

Sometimes she would direct her attacks on the couple as a whole. “Maurice and Amélie, now, there are happy people, who get along well. Not like certain others, who only put on a show.”

She would stop a village woman in the hallway, next to her daughter-in-law’s door, and spin out her troubles. “What do you expect? They are young,” the woman would say, while avidly enjoying the gossip. “Ah! they will not always be young!” the mother-in-law would go on. “Youth passes. I, too, used to kiss my husband, but that’s all finished. Go on! Death takes us all. Just let me see them in ten years, or even before.”

Let’s be fair. She had her changes of mood, and they were very touching.

“My dear, my lovely, what can I do for you? Never mind what I say: I am as fond of you as I am of my own daughter.