And why is this?  The reason is, that a friend is somebody and the public nobody; a friend has a face, the public has not; a friend is a being, present, hearing, looking, a real being—­the public is an invisible being, a being of the reason, an abstraction; a friend has a name, and the public is anonymous; a friend is a confidant, and the public is a fiction.  I blush before the one, because he is a man; I do not blush before the other, because it is an idea.  When I write or speak before the public, I feel myself as free, as exempt from the susceptibilities of one man to another, as if I were speaking or writing before God and in the desert; the crowd is a solitude; you see it, you know that it exists, but you know it only as a mass.  As an individual it does not exist.  Now this modesty of which you speak, being the respect of one’s self before some other person, when there is no person distinct on account of the multitude, becomes without a motive.  Psyche blushed under a lamp because the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven.  Here is the exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of the freedom of his utterance before all the world.  Do you accuse me of violating mysteries before you?  You have not the right:  I do not know you, I have confided nothing to you personally.  You are guilty of impropriety in reading what is not addressed to you.  You are somebody, you are not the public.  What do you want with me?  I have not spoken to you:  you have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to reply.

So thought St. Augustine, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Caesar, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Montaigne, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, and all other men who have confided to the world the genuine palpitations of their own hearts.  True gladiators they are in the human Colosseum, not playing miserable comedies of sentiment and style to distract an academy, but struggling and dying in earnest on the stage of the world, and writing on the sand, with the blood of their own veins, the heroism, the failings, or the agonies of the human heart.

Having said this, I resume these notes where I left them, blushing for one thing only before these critics, that is, for not having either the soul of St. Augustine or the genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in order to merit, by indiscretions as sacred and touching, the pardon of tender hearts and the condemnation of narrow minds, that take every movement of the soul for an obscenity, and hide their faces whenever they are shown a heart.

* * * * *

BALZAC.