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He had a sort of enamel of good humour which showed that his indelicacy was his profession; and he asked for revelations of the vie intime of his victims with the bland confidence of a fashionable physician inquiring about symptoms.
"It would have been too intime decidedly too intime. Breakfast, dinner, and tea en famille it would have been the end of the world if I could have reached the third day." And she made the same observation to her maid Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her confidence.
There is frequent discordance in their narration of the same event, and one is often embarrassed in trying to reconcile them. On the one hand, it is certain that Balzac was not always exact in his statements; on the other, Werdet's memory, in the seventies, when he wrote his Portrait Intime of the novelist, was as certainly now and again treacherous.
The occasional note of depression and discouragement, however, is a different thing; here, for those who know the "Journal Intime," there is already something characteristic, something which foretells the future.
M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain "barbarous" air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the "Journal Intime."
I would like to write about several of those ancient Dames, as they were affectionately called, and to materialize others of the shadows that stir in my recollection; but this would be to go outside the lines of my purpose, which is simply to indicate one of the various sorts of changes that have come over the vie intime of formerly secluded places like Portsmouth the obliteration of odd personalities, or, if not the obliteration, the general disregard of them.
In quite another tone, the novelist discussed the proposed scheme, promised to use his influence on the young publisher's behalf, and gave him the Country Doctor for the price offered. Thenceforward, a familiar guest in the dwelling of the Rue Cassini, Werdet described it in detail, when composing his Portrait Intime.
His aunt had been established there for several weeks, and he had received a couple of letters from her. "Those people you were so devoted to last summer at Vevey have turned up here, courier and all," she wrote. "They seem to have made several acquaintances, but the courier continues to be the most intime.
The story of the "Journal Intime" is a story to make us think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature like Amiel's, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of vision and of reproduction which the intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many respects so real and so splendid, and produces results so stirring often to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in the end we put down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of gratitude.
But my first steps toward its realization were to begin with the short story of Miss Bretherton, published in 1884, and then the translation of Amiel's Journal Intime, which appeared in 1885.
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