"Time was when I wept in front of things that now leave me unmoved; but, in captivating my childish heart, did they not accomplish their task even as those do now which quicken the beating of my woman's heart?...
"Learn to appreciate life and to look upon all that does not enhance it as vain and wearisome. As there is nothing in this world which has not its relation to life, in loving it, my Roseline, you will understand everything and accept everything.
"I want your eyes, when presenting to your mind whatever is best in a great work, to learn the luxury of lingering on it; I want your ears to perceive the wonderful, voluptuous charm of sounds, your hands to rejoice in things soft to the touch; I want you to learn how to breathe with delight and how to eat with pleasure. Don't smile. None of all this is childish; it is made up of tiny joyous movements which the simplest existence can command when it knows how to recognise them. And yet ... and yet I feel a selfish wish to leave you still in your prison, so that your desire to escape from it may keep on growing! I love that desire, I love your actual distress, I love the wretchedness of your past, the wretchedness of your present, I love you to see difficulties in the way of your deliverance....
"Oh, if those obstacles could give you, as they do me, that sort of intoxication for which I cherish them! When at last I see the goal beyond them, my heart leaps for joy. But hardly is the goal attained when I rejoice in it only because it brings me to another, higher and more distant; and my imagination resumes its course, never looking back except to measure the road already traversed.... In this way, never satisfied and yet happy in the mere fact that I am advancing and in the knowledge that no more can be asked of a poor human will, I have the feeling that my life never stops."
"Dearest, it is evening; it is cold and wet out of doors; but peace and gaiety shed their radiance in the great drawing-room which you will soon know, white and bare as a convent-parlour, living and bright as joy itself. Chance gave me to-day a long day of solitude, like those at Sainte-Colombe. And yet the hours passed before me and I could not make them fruitful. When such favours come to me in the midst of excitement, I am too glad of them to be able to profit by them; I can but feel them; and they control me without leaving me time to control them in my turn. I listen to my life, I contemplate it. It has too many opposing voices, too many absolutely different shapes; my consciousness is lost in it as a precious stone is swallowed up by the sea. I blush at such chaos. My soul appears to me only fit to compare with one of those wretched table-cloths which country dressmakers patch together, at the end of the year, out of the thousand scraps of the thousand different materials which they have cut during the season. But is not this the natural result of the diversity of our feminine souls?