been in the first instance entrusted--described in a few reserved and
sober words the genesis and objects of the publication. Some thousands
of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty years, had
come into the hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," said
the _Avertissement_, "with several ends in view. Amiel recorded in them
his various occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in
them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him
by books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his most
private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became
conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings
of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and
confession, the soul's cry for inward peace, might make themselves
freely heard.

"... In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him,
Amiel expressed the wish that his literary executors should publish
those parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either
interest as thought or value as experience. The publication of this
volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it,
_not a volume of Memoirs_, but the confidences of a solitary thinker,
the meditations of a philosopher for whom the things of the soul were
the sovereign realities of existence."

Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet _debut_. It
contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material.
M. Scherer's Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely
necessary to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but
nothing more. Everything of a local or private character that could be
excluded was excluded. The object of the editors in their choice of
passages for publication was declared to be simply "the reproduction of