March 8, 1868.--Madame----kept me to have tea with three young friends
of hers--three sisters, I think. The two youngest are extremely pretty,
the dark one as pretty as the blonde. Their fresh faces, radiant with
the bloom of youth, were a perpetual delight to the eye. This electric
force of beauty has a beneficent effect upon the man of letters; it acts
as a real restorative. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent as I am, the
neighborhood of health, of beauty, of intelligence and of goodness,
exercises a powerful influence upon my whole being; and in the same way
I am troubled and affected just as easily by the presence near me of
troubled lives or diseased souls. Madame ---- said of me that I must be
"superlatively feminine" in all my perceptions. This ready sympathy and
sensitiveness is the reason of it. If I had but desired it ever so
little, I should have had the magical clairvoyance of the somnambulist,
and could have reproduced in myself a number of strange phenomena. I
know it, but I have always been on my guard against it, whether from
indifference or from prudence. When I think of the intuitions of every
kind which have come to me since my youth, it seems to me that I have
lived a multitude of lives. Every characteristic individuality shapes
itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the moment into its own
image; and I have only to turn my attention upon myself at such a time
to be able to understand a new mode of being, a new phase of human
nature.
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