In her house you do not sit down, you recline

More from Jules Renard (did you really expect anything else from me today?):

At twenty, one thinks profoundly, and badly.

He wept cats and dogs

Every now and then he had to skim off his seething thoughts


He walked noislessly, like a fish

The journal is full of this kind of stuff; little throw away lines, observations and quite random thoughts.  Other times, it reads more like a diary.  Taking his young son to the seaside:

..he is terrified of the crabs which walk sidweays and the lobsters with their blind men's gropings.  We put a little crayfish in the pocket of his pinafore, whereupon he placed his hands behind his back like Napoleon after Moscow, and stood that way for a good half-hour, posessed by I know what thoughts, walking backwards now and then, and pretty perplexed by this toy that lay on his stomach.  This might be a way of making him behave which we had not thought of.

Being paid to write:

Yesterday, collected my first sou for my writing.  At such a moment, a sou is as handsome as 500,000 francs

He lunches with Oscar Wilde ("He does not walk around a table, he moves the table out of the way") and becomes friends with Sarah Bernhardt, who he quite fancies, I think:

Sarah Bernhardt.  When she comes down the winding staircase of the hotel, it looks as though she were standing still, while the staircase turns around her.

When I left Mme Sarah Bernardt I was in the mood to write a fine epic poem if I had the time

"You are stupid" she says.  And I am not sure that it is meant pleasantly.

At the sign of Sarah Bernhardt I would follow her to the ends of the earth, with my wife.

Chez Sarah Bernhardt.  Near a monumental fireplace, she reclines on the pelt of a polar bear.  Because in her house you do not sit down, you recline.