19 November 1900

 

He has been reading Balzac to me, although he professes not to understand it.  I offer him a brandy-and-soda, and he becomes strangely interested.  Now that my own life is quite remote from me, I long to enter the noisy thoroughfares and dilapidated courtyards of Balzac's imagination.  The details of the past return and surround me, and I am at peace.

      Maurice tells me that he does not care for 'old books', but I have explained to him that Balzac is the only thoroughly modern French novelist; he looked at me so sweetly that I knew at once that he did not believe me.  I explained to him that the idea of progress is an absurdity: no age is to be preferred to another, and look, even I have become a child again.  'I will tell you a secret,' I said to him, 'I have told you that our age is primitive and terrible.  Well, the next age will be primitive also, and then the next, and then the next.'

      Dante walks in exile at the same time as Augustine speaks in the market place of Tyre, and Samson is led into the air by a boy.  There is a picture of a young man in the Louvre - a prince, I believe, and his eyes are sad.  I would like to see that picture again before I die.  I would like to return to that past - to enter another man's heart.  In that moment of transition, when I was myself and someone else, of my own time and in another's, the secrets of the universe would stand revealed.