This book is not made for my wives, my daughters or my sisters. I have few of such things. God is a scandal, a scandal that rebounds. XXI Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility, that is one's genius. By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys of a young household. The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the odor of fur with the odor of woman. I remember.... Finally, I loved my mother for her elegance. Thus I was a precocious dandy. The Protestant countries lack two elements essential to the happiness of a well-bred man: gallantry and devotion. The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleasing to the mind, as discords to blasé ears. What is intoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing. Germany expresses meditation by line, as England by perspective. There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a nervous shock that is felt in the cerebellum. Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to love. STYLE.--The eternal note, the eternal and cosmopolitan style. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe. Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine. The cat is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of cleanliness, of voluptuousness, etc. XXII A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, yields three hundred and sixty-five times a little money, that is, an enormous sum. _At the same time fame is won._ To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to create a pounced drawing. My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please her. XXIII To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean? What more absurd than progress since man, as is proven by everyday fact, is always like and equal to man, that is to say, always in the savage state! What are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnare his dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in unknown forests, is he not eternal man, i.e., the most perfect beast of pray? They say I am thirty years of age; but if I have lived three minutes in one..., am I not ninety? ... Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed souls? XXIV I think that the infinite and mysterious charm that rests in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a vessel in motion, springs, in the first place, from regularity and symmetry (which are of the primordial needs of the human mind, as much as complexity and harmony)--and, secondly, from the successive multiplication and generation of all the curves and imaginary figures cut in space by the real elements of the object. The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, of a creature full of genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.