Joseph Joubert.
Full of oddities and eccentricities, M. Joubert will be an eternal loss to those who knew him. He had an extraordinary grip upon one's mind and heart; and, when once he had seized hold of you, his image was there, like a fixed thought, like an obsession that refused to be driven away. He made great pretensions to calmness, and no one was so easily perturbed as he: he watched himself in order to stop those emotions of the mind, which he thought injurious to his health, and constantly his friends came and disturbed the precautions which he had taken to keep well, for he could not prevent himself from being affected by their sadness or joy: he was an egoist who troubled himself only about others. In order to recover his strength, he often thought himself obliged to close his eyes and refrain from speaking for hours at a time. Heaven knows what noise and movement passed inwardly within him during this repose and silence which he laid upon himself. M. Joubert at every moment changed his diet and regimen, living one day on milk, another on minced meat, causing himself to be jolted at full speed over the roughest roads, or drawn at a snail's pace along the smoothest alleys. When he read, he tore out of his books the leaves which displeased him, thus forming a library for his own use, composed of scooped-out works, contained in bindings too large for them.
A profound metaphysician, his philosophy, thanks to an elaboration peculiar to himself, became painting or poetry; a Plato with the heart of a La Fontaine, he had formed an idea of perfection which prevented him from finishing anything. In manuscripts found after his death, he said:
"I am like an ‚Æolian harp, which gives forth a few beautiful sounds and plays no tune."
Madame Victorine de Chastenay[402] maintained that "he had the appearance of a soul which had met with a body by accident, and put up with it as best it could:" a definition both charming and true.
We laughed at the enemies of M. de Fontanes, who tried to pass him off for a deep and dissembling politician: he was simply an irascible poet, frank to the pitch of anger, with a mind hedged in by contrariety, and as little able to conceal its opinion as to accept that of others. The literary principles of his friend Joubert were not his: the latter found some good everywhere and in every writer; Fontanes, on the contrary, held such and such a doctrine in abhorrence, and could not hear the names mentioned of certain authors. He was the sworn enemy of the principles of modern composition: to place before the reader's eyes material action, the crime at work or the gibbet with its rope, seemed to him so many enormities; he maintained that objects should never be seen except amid poetic surroundings, as though under a crystal globe. Sorrow spending itself mechanically through the eyes seemed to him a sensation fit only for the Cirque or the Grève; he understood the tragic sentiment only as ennobled by admiration and changed, through the medium of art, into "a charming pity." I quoted the Greek vases to him: in the arabesques of those vases one sees Hector's body drawn behind the car of Achilles, while a little figure, flying in the air, represents the shade of Patrocles, consoled by the vengeance of the son of Thetis.
"Well, Joubert," cried Fontanes, "what do you say to that metamorphosis of the muse? How those Greeks respected the soul!"
Joubert thought himself attacked, and placed Fontanes in contradiction with himself by reproaching him with his indulgence for me.
These discussions, highly comical as they often were, never came to an end: one evening, at half-past eleven, when I lived on the Place Louis XV., in the attic floor of Madame de Coislin's house, Fontanes climbed up my eighty-four stairs again to come furiously, with many raps of his cane, to finish an argument which he had left interrupted: it concerned Picard[403], whom at that moment he placed far above Molière; he would have taken good care not to have written a single word of what he said: Fontanes talking and Fontanes pen in hand were two different men.
It was M. de Fontanes, I like to repeat, who encouraged my first attempts: it was he who announced the publication of the Génie du Christianisme; it was his muse which, full of astonished devotion, directed mine in the new paths along which it had precipitated itself: he taught me to conceal the deformity of objects by the manner of throwing light upon them; to put classic language into the mouths of my romantic characters as far as in me lay.