Source: On the Heights of Despair (1934)
The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
“One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.”
On peut tout acquérir dans la solitude, hormis du caractère.
Fragments
De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.
Part I
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)
Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, January 8, 1972, page 11.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1972
