"... It is my habit to separate myself from the verses I have written before finishing them, and to leave them for some time in the drawers of my writing-table. I even forget them sometimes, when the piece has seemed to me a failure, and it may happen to me to find them again several years after. I then re-write them; and I have the power of calling up again, with great clearness, the feeling which had suggested them. This feeling I pose, so to speak, in my inner consciousness, like a model which I am copying by means of the palette and brush of language. This is the exact opposite of improvisation. It seems to me that at such times I am working on the recollection of an affective state. "When I remember the emotions aroused in me by the entry of the Germans into Paris after our last defeats, I find it impossible not to _experience this same emotion afresh_, simultaneously and indivisibly; while the mnemonic image of the Paris of that day remains in my memory very distinct from any actual perception. When I remember the kind of affection which, in my childhood, I felt for my mother, I find it impossible not to become, in some sort, a child again, at the very moment when I call up this memory—not to allow my heart of to-day to participate in the former tenderness due to recollection. I am almost inclined to ask myself if every _recollection of feeling does not take on the character of a hallucination_. “When a student, I formed a connection in which I was grossly deceived; so everyday an occurrence that the correctness of my observations can probably be tested by most men from their own recollections. There was nothing very deep in my love, imagination being the principal factor, and I have long ago forgiven the injury, which, after all, chiefly concerned my vanity. Both rancour and affection vanished long ago. Under these circumstances, if I call up the recollection, I recognise at the outset that I am now a stranger to the feelings which I can remember; but I soon notice that I only remain a stranger to them so long as the memories are vague and confused. As soon as, by an effort of recollection, I make them more precise, they cease _ipso facto_ to be memories only, and _I am quite surprised to feel the movements of youthful passion and angry jealousy renewed in me_. It is indeed only this revival which could enable me to retouch the verses which this little adventure of long-past years induced me to perpetrate, and to allow the expression of my former feelings to benefit by the experience acquired in my art.”