“Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur Attaché nos coeurs à la terre; Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l’important, Mille choses pour nous ont du prix ... et pourtant Une seule était nécessaire.
“Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux; Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos En nous quelque chose soupire; Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d’amis.... Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.
“Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L’homme s’agite, et s’use, et vieillit sans progrès Sur sa toile de Pénélope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais; Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.”
Upon the small remains of Amiel’s prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the “Pensées,” published in the latter half of the volume containing the “Grains de Mils,” are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.
The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the Journal--we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and at fifty-three he received, at his doctor’s hands, his _arrêt de mort_. We are told that what killed him was “heart disease, complicated by disease of the larynx,” and that he suffered “much and long.” He was buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the monument which now marks his resting-place.
We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present available for the description of Amiel’s life and relations toward the outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the “Journal Intime,” as Joubert’s “Correspondence” completes the “Pensées.” There must be ample material for it; and Amiel’s letters would probably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question of publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the “Journal Intime.”
