Here, let me fill your basin. Let me do the heavy work. Your hands are too white for that.”

Suddenly, her face would turn nasty:

“Am I a maid-of-all-work?”

And, in her bedroom, she would separate the photographs of her children from those of her daughter-in-law, would leave her isolated, abandoned, no doubt sorely vexed.

To read two pages of Taine’s L’lntelligence and then go and hunt dandelions—there’s a dream, and that is my life for the time being. I attend the bedding down of the thrushes, the retiring of the woodcocks, the going to sleep of the woods. All this makes me stupid. Fortunately, two pages of Taine pull me out of the mud, and I am in full fantasy, above the world, furiously pursuing the study of my self, of its decomposition, of our annihilation.

APRIL

All I have read, all I have thought, all my forced paradoxes, my hatred of the conventional, my contempt for the commonplace, do not prevent me from turning soft on the first day of spring, from looking for violets under the hedges, among the turds and the scraps of decayed paper; from playing with the village youngsters, giving close attention to lizards and yellow-robed butterflies, bringing home a little blue flower to my wife. Everlasting contradiction. Continual effort to get beyond stupidity, and inevitable backsliding. Happily!

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

MAY

This morning, seated on a bundle of wood, in full sun, among the long leaves of lilies of the valley, while our eyes searched for their still-closed buds, we talked of nothing but death and what would happen if one of us were to go. The sun blinded us; our whole being was drenched with the desire to live, and we found it charming to talk of this inevitable death while it was still far away. Ah, those we leave behind! Fantec, his hat on his ear like a tough character, slept, smiled, sucked his bottle. A few men, placing the trunks of young oaks on two pitchforks stuck in the ground by their handles, swiftly divested them of their bark, a bark that was living and full of sap, like a skin, and that then shrank together in a last contraction.

The spider glides on an invisible thread as though it were swimming in the air.

The friendship of a talented man of letters would be a great benefaction. It is a pity that those whose good graces we yearn for are always dead.

Today, Marie Pierry’s cow calved. Marie, in tears, said: “I can’t watch that. I’m getting out of here.”

Then she’d come back. “Oh, the poor dear! The poor dear! There! She is dead! I can see she is dead. She’ll never pull out of it!”

The cow lowed and heaved sighs. Lexandre, pulling at the calf’s legs, pouted his lips at her: “There, my beauty!” Father Castel presided: “Pull, children, pull!”

Everyone felt himself to be a mother, and when the cow, having produced her calf and drunk a bottle of sweetened wine, began licking the salt that had been sprinkled over the calf, everyone had tears in his eyes.

AUGUST

It’s enough to throw you into despair: to read everything, and remember nothing! Because you do remember nothing. You may strain as much as you like: everything escapes. Here and there a few tatters remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke left over after a train has passed.

You can do what you like: until a certain age—I don’t know what—there is no pleasure in talking to a woman you cannot imagine as a mistress.

SEPTEMBER—Paris

What do I want? La gloire! One man told me I had something in the belly. Another said I did things better and with less dirt than Maupassant . . . Still another . . . Is that supposed to be fame? No, men are too ugly, and I am as ugly as they. I do not like them; I can’t care about what they think. Women, then? There was one, this evening, pretty, with a handsome bust, who said to me: “I read and reread Crime de Village.” There is fame; I hold it in my hand. But this woman is a fool.