It may be because I live much alone and the smallest details take on too much importance in a life so monotonous as mine. I give too much heed to my living and thinking: I hear the throbbing of my arteries, the beating of my heart; by dint of close attention I disengage my most intangible ideas from the confused haze in which they float, and give them a body.--If I had more to do I should not notice all these trivial things and should not have time to look at my heart under a microscope, as I do all day long. The din of action would drive away this swarm of indolent thoughts that are flying about in my head and deafening me with the buzzing of their wings: instead of pursuing phantoms I should come to blows with realities; I should ask women for nothing beyond what they can give--pleasure--and I should not try to embrace some fanciful ideal decked out in hazy perfections.--This desperate tension of the eye of my heart toward an invisible object has impaired my sight. I am unable to see what is, from having stared at what is not, and my eye, so keen for the ideal, is terribly short-sighted for the real; so that I have known women whom everybody declared to be most ravishing creatures, but who seemed to me very far from that. I have greatly admired pictures generally considered to be daubs, and fantastic or unintelligible verses have given me more pleasure than the most courtly productions.--I should not be at all astonished if, after addressing so many sighs to the moon and looking at the stars with strained gaze, after perpetrating so many elegies and sentimental apostrophes, I should fall in love with some vile girl from the street, or some ugly old woman; that would be a great come-down!--Reality will perhaps take its revenge thus for the little care I have taken to pay court to it:--wouldn't it be a fine thing if I should conceive a romantic passion for a scullery wench or a low, dirty trollop? Can you imagine me playing a guitar under a kitchen window and supplanted by a lackey carrying an old toothless dowager's pet cur?--Or perhaps, finding nothing in this world worthy of my love, I shall end by adoring myself, like the late Narcissus of selfish memory. To protect myself from such a great disaster, I look at myself in every mirror and in all the streams I pass. To tell the truth, as a result of musing and mental wandering I am terribly afraid of being led into something monstrous and unnatural. That is a serious matter and I must be on my guard.--Adieu, my friend;--I am going at once to call on the pink lady, for fear of relapsing into my usual state of meditation. I do not think that we shall trouble ourselves very much about actualities, and if we do anything it surely won't be in a spiritual direction, although she is very spirituelle. I carefully roll up and put away in a drawer the pattern of my ideal mistress in order not to try it upon this one. I propose to enjoy tranquilly such good qualities and merits as she has.