“It is real torture to me to see ugly things or ugly persons. Architecture in bad taste, a piece of furniture of bad shape, prevent me from taking pleasure in a house, however comfortable and attractive it may otherwise be. The best wine seems almost sour to me in an ill-turned glass, and I confess that I would rather have the most Lacedaemonian broth on an enamel by Bernard de Palissy than the most delicate game in an earthenware plate. Externals have always taken a violent hold on me, and that is-the reason why I avoid the company of old people; it grieves me, and affects me disagreeably, because they are wrinkled and deformed, though some indeed have a beauty of their own; and a good deal of disgust is mingled with the pity that I feel for them. Of all the ruins in the world the ruin of a man is assuredly the saddest to contemplate.
“If I were a painter (and I have always regretted that I am not), I would people my canvases only with goddesses, nymphs, madonnas, cherubs, and cupids. To devote one's brush to the making of portraits, unless they be those of beautiful persons, appears to me high treason against the art; and, far from wishing to double ugly or ignoble faces, and insignificant and vulgar heads, I should be more inclined to have them cut off the originals. Caligula's ferocity turned in this direction would seem to me almost laudable.
“The only thing in the world that I have ever wished for with any consistency is to be handsome. By handsome, I mean as handsome as Paris or Apollo. To be free from deformity, and to have tolerably regular features, i.e. to have one's nose in the middle of one's face, and neither snub nor hooked, eyes neither red nor blood-shot, and a mouth becomingly cut, is not to be handsome. At this rate I should be so, and I am as remote from the idea that I have formed of manly beauty as if I were one of the dock-jacks that strike the hour on the bells; I might have a mountain on each shoulder, legs as crooked as those of a turnspit, and the nose and muzzle of an ape, and yet have as close a resemblance to it.
“I often look at myself in the glass for whole hours, with unimaginable fixity and attention to see whether some improvement has not taken place in my face; I wait for the lines to make a movement and become straighter or round-er with more delicacy and purity, for my eye to light up and swim in a more vivacious fluid, for the sinuosity that separates my forehead from my nose to be filled up, and for my profile thus to assume the stillness and simplicity of the Greek profile, and I am always very much surprised that this does not happen. I am always hoping that some spring or other I shall lay aside the form that I have, as a serpent sheds his old skin.
“To think that I lack so little to be handsome, and that I shall never be so! What! half a line, a hundredth or a thousandth part of a line more or less in one place or another, a little less flesh on this bone, a little more on that-a painter or a statuary would have settled the affair in half an hour. What mattered it to the atoms composing me to crystallize in such or such a way? How did it concern this outline to come out here and to go in there, and where was the necessity that I should be as I am and not different? In truth if I had Chance by the throat I think I should strangle it. Because it has pleased a wretched particle of I know not what to fall I know not where, and to coagulate foolishly into the clumsy countenance that I display, I am to be unhappy forever! Is it not the most foolish and miserable thing in the world? How is it that my soul, with her eager longing for it, cannot let the poor carrion that she keeps upright fall prostrate, and go and animate one of those statues whose exquisite beauty saddens and ravishes her?
“There are two or three persons whom I would assassinate with delight, being careful, however, not to bruise or spoil them, if I were in possession of the word that would effect the transmigration of souls from one body to the other. It has always seemed to me that to do what I wish (and what that is I do not know), I had need of very great and perfect beauty, and I imagine to myself that, if I had it, my life, which is so fettered and tormented, would have been left in peace.
“We see so many beautiful faces in pictures! — why is none of them mine? — so many charming heads hidden beneath the dust and smoke of time in the depths of the old galleries! Would it not be better if they left their frames and came and expanded on my shoulders? Would Raphael's reputation suffer very much if one of the angels that he makes to fly in swarms in the ultramarine of his canvases were to give up his mask to me for thirty years? So many of the most beautiful parts of his frescoes have peeled off and fallen away from old age! No one would heed it. What are these silent beauties, upon which common men bestow scarce a heedless glance, doing around these walls? and why has God or chance not wit enough to do what a man has accomplished with a few hairs fitted on a stick as a handle, and a few pastes of different colors tempered on aboard?
“My first sensation before one of these marvelous heads, whose painted gaze seems to pass through you and extend to the infinite, is a shock, and a feeling of admiration which is not devoid of terror. My eyes grow moist, my heart beats; then, when I become a little more accustomed to it, and have penetrated further into the secret of its beauty, I make a tacit comparison between it and myself; jealousy twists itself at the bottom of my soul in more tangled knots than a viper, and I have all the trouble in the world to refrain from throwing myself upon the canvas and tearing it to pieces.
“To be handsome means to have in one's self so great a charm that every one smiles on you and welcomes you, that before you have spoken everybody is already prepossessed in your favor and disposed to be of your opinion; that you have only to pass through a street or show yourself on a balcony to create friends or mistresses for you in the crowd. To have no need of being amiable in order to be loved, to be exempt from all the expenditure of wit and complaisance to which ugliness compels you, and from the thousand moral qualities which are necessary to make up for the absence of personal beauty;-what a splendid and magnificent gift!
“And if one could unite supreme beauty with supreme strength, and have the muscles of Hercules beneath the skin of Antinous, what more could he wish for? I am sure that with these two things and the soul that I have, I should in less than three years be emperor of the world! Another thing that I have desired almost as much as beauty and strength is the gift of transporting myself with the swiftness of thought from one place to another. With the beauty of an angel, the strength of a tiger and the wings of an eagle, I might begin to find that the world is not so badly organized as I at first believed. A beautiful mask to allure and fascinate its prey, wings to swoop down upon it and carry it off, and claws to rend it;-so long as I have not these I shall be unhappy.
“All the passions and tastes that I have had have been merely these three longings disguised. I like weapons, horses and women: weapons to take the place of the sinews that I lacked; horses to serve me instead of wings; women that I might at least possess in somebody the beauty that was wanting in myself. I sought in preference the most ingeniously murderous weapons, and those which inflicted incurable wounds. I never had an opportunity of making use of a kris or yataghan: nevertheless I like to have them about me; I draw them from the sheath with a feeling of unspeakable security and strength, I fence with them at random with great energy, and if I chance to see the reflection of my face in the glass, I am astonished at its ferocious expression.
“As to horses, I so override them that they must die or tell the reason why. If I had not given up riding Ferragus he would have been dead long ago, and that would have been a pity, for he is a good animal. What Arab horse could have legs so ready and so slender as my desire? In women I have sought nothing but the exterior, and, as those that I have seen up to the present are far from answering to the idea that I have formed of beauty, I have fallen back on pictures and statues;-a resource which is after all pitiful enough when one has senses so inflamed as mine. However, there is something grand and beautiful in loving a statue, in that the love is perfectly disinterested, that you have not to dread the satiety or disgust of victory, and that you cannot reasonably hope for a second wonder similar to the story of Pygmalion. The impossible has always pleased me.
“Is it not singular that I who am still in the fairest months of adolescence, and who, so far from abusing everything, have not even made use of the simplest things, have become surfeited to such a degree that I am no longer tickled by what is whimsical or difficult? That satiety follows pleasure is a natural law and easy to be understood. That a man who has eaten largely of every dish at a banquet should be no longer hungry, and should seek to rouse his sluggish palate with the thousand arrows of spices or irritant wines may be most readily explained; but that a man who has just sat down to table and has scarcely tasted the first viands should be seized with such superb disgust, be unable to touch without vomiting, any dishes but those possessing extreme relish and care only for high-flavored meats, cheeses marbled with blue, truffles and wines with a taste of flint, is a phenomenon which can only result from a peculiar organization; it is as though an infant six months old were to find its nurse's milk insipid and refuse to suck anything but brandy.
“I am as weary as if I had gone through all the prodigalities of Sardanapalus, and yet my life has been, in appearance, tranquil and chaste. It is a mistake to think that possession is the only road which leads to satiety. It can also be reached by desire, and abstinence is more wearing than excess. Desire such as mine fatigues differently from possession. Its glance traverses and penetrates the object which it fain would have, and which is radiant above it, more quickly and deeply than if it touched it. What more can it be taught by use? What experience can be equal to such constant and impassioned contemplation?
