It is a doubt which never leaves me even in my moments of
religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maia; and I look at her, as
it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical.
What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what is it I hope for?
It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe in goodness, and I hope
that good will prevail. Deep within this ironical and disappointed being
of mine there is a child hidden--a frank, sad, simple creature, who
believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly
superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a
pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer.
"Borne dans sa nature, infini dans ses voeux,
L'homme est un dieu tombe qui se souvient des cieux."
October 14, 1869.--Yesterday, Wednesday, death of Sainte-Beuve. What a
loss!
October 16, 1869.--_Laboremus_ seems to have been the motto of
Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Severus. He died in harness,
and up to the evening before his last day he still wrote, overcoming the
sufferings of the body by the energy of the mind. To-day, at this very
moment, they are laying him in the bosom of mother earth. He refused the
sacraments of the church; he never belonged to any confession; he was
one of the "great diocese"--that of the independent seekers of truth,
and he allowed himself no final moment of hypocrisy.
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