Reflections on life, selected thoughts of Remy de Gourmont, preceded by an introduction by Georges Prévot, university lecturer.

For the learned editor, Remy de Gourmont was above all a philosopher, ingenious in hiding the seriousness of his speculations under flowery plots. The thesis is very tenable. One can be a very profound philosopher without paying the diploma of logician or metaphysician, witness the undulating Montaigne.

As Gascon illustrates, Gourmont, the Norman, was a prodigious “jack of all trades”. I will pass on this familiar but expedient term, “Everything, except perhaps music, held his attention,” remarks Mr. Georges Prévot. However, among so many nuances, reluctances, uncertainties and contradictions, we see several major guiding ideas emerging.

Although he has repeatedly said that he does not believe in the reality of the world. externally, Rémy de Gourmont saw and judged nature as a physicist, not without some harshness. For him, the phenomena of life are what they are, that is to say neither good nor bad, since they obey inescapable physical laws... Everything is bent to the demands of a fatal determinism. .. So let us live fully and savor. all the pleasure that is available to us. Something will save us from vulgarity or baseness..."

Here are some of these thoughts which sometimes recall, but with more harshness and bitterness, the thoughts blooming in the Jardin d'Epicure, the garden of M. Bergeret.

"There is no life except us, perhaps: a bare arm that slips into the rose bushes, increases the beauty of the roses and the grass is greener along the trail left by a woman's dress .”

“Everything that is, by that very fact, is logical. An illogical fact would be a fact without a cause.”

“The man of action is only a digger; the least storyteller stirs more life than a conqueror”

“It is from laziness that everything was born among men. The arts and sciences date from the year when one of your ancestors was able to spend the winter by his fire. games, love, all the joys, Leisure is the greatest and most beautiful conquest of man.”

“The true school of happiness is illusion”

But literature and philosophy are noble illusions!!

- J.-J. B. THE WATCHMAN.