Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
XXXI
Of love, of the predilection of the French for military metaphors. Here every metaphor wears a moustache.
Militant literature.—To man the breach.—To bear the standard aloft.—To maintain the standard high and firm. —To hurl oneself into the thick of the fight.—One of the veterans. All these fine phrases apply generally to the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the coffee-house.
XXXII
To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The littérateurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society.
XXXIII
Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health suspends us on the future.
He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me as one who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and bears them away in his fall.