Then, too, the sun shines brightly, the air is fragrant, and the illusions of youth-those birds of our life's morning-sing around us.

Why do they fly away when we are older?
Where do this sadness and this solitude, which gradually steal upon us, come from?
The course seems to be the same with individuals and with communities: at starting, so readily made happy, so easily enchanted; and at the goal, the bitter disappointment or reality! The road, which began among hawthorns and primroses, ends speedily in deserts or in precipices! Why is there so much confidence at first, so much doubt at last?
Has, then, the knowledge of life no other end but to make it unfit for happiness?
Must we condemn ourselves to ignorance if we would preserve hope?
Is the world and is the individual man intended, after all, to find rest only in an eternal childhood?
How many times have I asked myself these questions! Solitude has the advantage or the danger of making us continually search more deeply into the same ideas.

As our discourse is only with ourself, we always give the same direction to the conversation; we are not called to turn it to the subject which occupies another mind, or interests another's feelings; and so an involuntary inclination makes us return forever to knock at the same doors! I interrupted my reflections to put my attic in order.

I hate the look of disorder, because it shows either a contempt for details or an unaptness for spiritual life.

To arrange the things among which we have to live, is to establish the relation of property and of use between them and us: it is to lay the foundation of those habits without which man tends to the savage state.