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Paul Bourget citations
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Paul Bourget, né le 2 septembre 1852 à Amiens et mort le 25 décembre 1935 à Paris, est un écrivain et essayiste français, membre de l'Académie française.

Ayant donné le signal d’une réaction contre le naturalisme en littérature, Bourget est d’abord tenté par le roman d’analyse expérimental. La finesse de ses études de mœurs et de caractères séduit le public mondain qu’il fréquente dans les salons parisiens de la Troisième République. Ses premiers romans – Cruelle énigme , Un crime d'amour et Mensonges – ont ainsi un grand retentissement auprès d’une jeune génération en quête de rêve de modernité.

Le romancier change ensuite de direction et s’oriente à partir du roman Le Disciple , considéré comme son œuvre majeure, vers le « roman à thèse », c’est-à-dire le roman d'idées. Il ne se contente plus de l’analyse des mœurs mais en dévoile les origines et les causes, soumises à des lois inéluctables et dont la transgression amène tous les désordres individuels et sociaux. Cette nouvelle voie conduit Paul Bourget à écrire des romans davantage psychologiques : L’Étape , Un divorce et Le Démon de midi . Il est alors influencé dans son engagement littéraire et dans son orientation romanesque par sa conversion au catholicisme et tente une synthèse entre la science et la foi. L’écrivain est amené à appliquer son talent de romancier psychologue et moraliste aux problèmes sociaux, politiques et religieux de son temps de ce début de XXe siècle.

Son œuvre multiple comprend aussi des poèmes de jeunesse, des essais et quelques pièces de théâtre. L’engagement politique de Paul Bourget même s’il reste souvent cantonné à l’expression littéraire s’est cependant manifesté au sein de mouvements militants et les nombreuses prises de position du romancier traditionaliste, catholique et antidreyfusard en faveur de la monarchie brouillent la lecture de son œuvre, aujourd’hui incomprise voire méprisée et tombée dans l’oubli. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. septembre 1852 – 25. décembre 1935   •   Autres noms Paul Charles Bourget
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Paul Bourget citations célèbres

“L'acte violent surprend toujours et est presque toujours désapprouvé; que ce soi une bombe, une gifle, un coup de feu, une détermination quelconque, la hardiesse, en déplaçant quelque chose d'établi, irrite et rebute.”

Paul Bourget

“Cet enseignement, c'est qu'il faut vivre comme on pense, sinon, tôt ou tard, on finit par penser comme on a vécu.”

Paul Bourget

The Demon of Noonday (1914)

“A de certaines minutes, les mots ne sont rien, c’est le ton qui est tout.”

Paul Bourget

Cosmopolis (1892)

Paul Bourget: Citations en anglais

“Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself, painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly. There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the glass which protected the pastel, and on this glass, because of this moisture, he sees distinctly the trace of two lips which had been placed upon the eyes of the portrait, two small delicate lips, the sight of which makes his heart beat. He leaves the gallery, questions a servant, who tells him that no one but the young woman he has in mind has been in the room that morning.”

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Paul Bourget

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

“Here was the worldly environment with which Fauchery is so often reproached. But the books and papers that littered the table bore witness that the present occupant of this charming retreat remained a substantial man of letters. His habit of constant work was still further attested by his face, which I admit, gave me all at once a feeling of remorse for the trick I was about to play him. If I had found him the snobbish pretender whom the weekly newspapers were in the habit of ridiculing, it would have been a delight to outwit his diplomacy. But no! I saw, as he put down his pen to receive me, a man about fifty-seven years old, with a face that bore the marks of reflection, eyes tired from sleeplessness, a brow heavy with thought, who said as he pointed to an easy chair, "You will excuse me, my dear confrère, for keeping you waiting."”

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Paul Bourget

I, his dear confrère! Ah! if he had known!
The Age for Love

“Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.”

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Paul Bourget

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

“When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.”

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Paul Bourget

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

“At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.”

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Paul Bourget

A de certaines minutes, les mots ne sont rien, c’est le ton qui est tout.
Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

“The forests have taught man liberty.”

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Paul Bourget

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 2 "The Beginning of a Drama"

“There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.”

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Paul Bourget

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 4 "Approaching Danger"

“Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.”

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Paul Bourget

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

“There is an intelligent man, who never questions his ideas," said Dorsenne to himself, when the Marquis had left him. "He is like the Socialists. What vigor of mind in that old wornout machine!”

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Paul Bourget

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 2 "The Beginning of a Drama"

“Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I had decided upon, there is always left a trace of envy for those who have triumphed in the melancholy struggle for literary supremacy.”

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Paul Bourget

The Age for Love

“The cruelest revenge of a woman is to remain faithful to a man.”

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Paul Bourget

La plus cruelle vengeance d'une femme est quelquefois de nous rester fidèle.
Physiologie de l'Amour Moderne http://books.google.com/books?id=5H5cAAAAMAAJ&q=%22La+plus+cruelle+vengeance+d'une+femme+est+quelquefois+de+nous+rester+fid%C3%A8le%22&pg=PA326#v=onepage (1889)

“I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.”

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Paul Bourget

The Age for Love

“My friend returned to the gallery, looked once more at the adorable imprint of the most innocent, the most passionate of caresses. A mirror hung near by, where he could compare his present with his former face, the man he was with the man he had been. He never told me and I never asked what his feelings were at that moment. Did he feel that he was too culpable to have inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved? Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had never given him a kiss like that at a time when he might have returned it? I only know that he left the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, the purity, the soul of a man of twenty.”

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Paul Bourget

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

“You wished to be only a spectator, the gentleman in the balcony who wipes the glasses of his lorgnette in order to lose none of the comedy. Well, you could not do so. That role is not permitted a man. He must act, and he acts always, even when he thinks he is looking on, even when he washes his hands as Pontius Pilate, that dilettante, too, who uttered the words of your masters and of yourself. What is truth? Truth is that there is always and everywhere a duty to fulfil.”

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Paul Bourget

Epilogue.
Cosmopolis (1892)

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