What life is around me!  See the swallow returning from her search for food, with her beak full of insects for her young ones; the sparrows shake the dew from their wings while they chase one another in the sunshine; and my neighbors throw open their windows, and welcome the morning with their fresh faces!  Delightful hour of waking, when everything returns to feeling and to motion; when the first light of day strikes upon creation, and brings it to life again, as the magic wand struck the palace of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood!  It is a moment of rest from every misery; the sufferings of the sick are allayed, and a breath of hope enters into the hearts of the despairing.  But, alas! it is but a short respite!  Everything will soon resume its wonted course:  the great human machine, with its long strains, its deep gasps, its collisions, and its crashes, will be again put in motion.

The tranquillity of this first morning hour reminds me of that of our first years of life.  Then, too, the sun shines brightly, the air is fragrant, and the illusions of youth-those birds of our life’s morning-sing around us.  Why do they fly away when we are older?  Where do this sadness and this solitude, which gradually steal upon us, come from?  The course seems to be the same with individuals and with communities:  at starting, so readily made happy, so easily enchanted; and at the goal, the bitter disappointment or reality!  The road, which began among hawthorns and primroses, ends speedily in deserts or in precipices!  Why is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last?  Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness?  Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope?  Is the world and is the individual man intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?

How many times have I asked myself these questions!  Solitude has the advantage or the danger of making us continually search more deeply into the same ideas.  As our discourse is only with ourself, we always give the same direction to the conversation; we are not called to turn it to the subject which occupies another mind, or interests another’s feelings; and so an involuntary inclination makes us return forever to knock at the same doors!

I interrupted my reflections to put my attic in order.  I hate the look of disorder, because it shows either a contempt for details or an unaptness for spiritual life.  To arrange the things among which we have to live, is to establish the relation of property and of use between them and us:  it is to lay the foundation of those habits without which man tends to the savage state.  What, in fact, is social organization but a series of habits, settled in accordance with the dispositions of our nature?

I distrust both the intellect and the morality of those people to whom disorder is of no consequence—­who can live at ease in an Augean stable.  What surrounds us, reflects more or less that which is within us.  The mind is like one of those dark lanterns which, in spite of everything, still throw some light around.  If our tastes did not reveal our character, they would be no longer tastes, but instincts.