And yet, at the same time it attracts me; I have need of it. Family
life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth,
appeals to me almost like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the
ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my
hopes; within, a common worship, toward the world outside, kindness and
beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral
relations which develop round the first, all these ideas intoxicate me
sometimes. But I put them aside because every hope is, as it were, an
egg whence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, because every joy
missed is a stab; because every seed confided to destiny contains an ear
of grief which the future may develop.
I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The
ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. Everything which
compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me
to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all
which injures my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mortally, degrades
and wounds me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and
repentances. The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every
human act, the leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element
of life, arrests me more certainly than the arm of the _Commandeur_.
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