Jules Renard

He’s a good shot. Here’s a bull’s eye—“Victor Hugo. His landslides of verse.” Here’s another terse literary judgment: “With men like Chateaubriand and Lamartine you travel in the air, but without direction.” Ouch.

Renard doesn’t only aim his arrows at others. He observes his own vanity as a writer. A reminder to himself—“You may write as few books as you like: People will persist in not knowing them all.” And he judges himself a slacker: “I live in laziness as in a prison.” It’s the curse of all writers: Somebody else is always publishing. But Renard can be droll about himself, as in this observation: “Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.” And he can be clever, making a bargain with time, that cruel taskmaster: “The sun rises before I do, but I go to bed after it does: We are even.” He can even outwit himself: “It’s many a day since I’ve felt ashamed of my vanity, or even tried to correct it. Of all my faults, it is the one that amuses me the most.”