In one of my dreams, I supped with M. Touron, who appeared to compose verses and music, which he sang to us. I addressed these four lines to him in my dream:
Mon cher Touron, que tu m'enchantes
Par la douceur de tes accens!
Que tes vers sont doux et coulans!
Tu les fais comme tu tes chantes.
Thy gentle accents, Touron dear,
Sound most delightful to my ear!
With how much ease the verses roll,
Which flow, while singing, from thy soul!
In another dream, I recited the first canto of the "Henriade" quite different from what it is. Yesterday, I dreamed that verses were recited at supper, and that some one pretended they were too witty. I replied that verses were entertainments given to the soul, and that ornaments are necessary in entertainments.
I have therefore said things in my sleep which I should have some difficulty to say when awake; I have had thoughts and reflections, in spite of myself, and without the least voluntary operation on my own part, and nevertheless combined my ideas with sagacity, and even with genius. What am I, therefore, if not a machine?
SOPHIST.
A geometrician, a little severe, thus addressed us one day: There is nothing in literature more dangerous than rhetorical sophists; and among these sophists none are more unintelligible and unworthy of being understood than the divine Plato.
The only useful idea to be found in him, is that of the immortality of the soul, which was already admitted among cultivated nations; but, then, how does he prove this immortality?
We cannot too forcibly appeal to this proof, in order to correctly appreciate this famous Greek. He asserts, in his "Phædon" that death is the opposite of life, that death springs from life, and the living from the dead, consequently that our souls will descend beneath the earth when we die.
If it is true that the sophist Plato, who gives himself out for the enemy of all sophists, reasons always thus, what have been all these pretended great men, and in what has consisted their utility?