ou, such a thing as indiscretion of heart. I felt this cruelly myself,
the first time when, having written certain poetic dreams of my soul
certain too real utterances of my sentiments, I read them to my most
intimate friends. My face was covered with blushes, and I could not
finish. I said to them: "No, I cannot go farther; you shall read it."
"And how is it," answered my friends, "that you cannot read to us what
you are about to give to all Europe to read?" "No," I said, "I cannot
tell why, but I feel no shame in letting the public read it, though I
experience an invincible repugnance to reading it myself, face to face to
only two or three of my friends."

They did not understand me--I did not understand myself. We together
exclaimed at the inconsistency of the human heart. Since then I have felt
the same instinctive repugnance at reading to a single person what cost
me not a single effort of violated modesty to give to the public: and
after having long reflected on it, I find that this apparent
inconsistency is at bottom only the perfect logic of our nature.

And why is this? The reason is, that a friend is somebody and the public
nobody; a friend has a face, the public has not; a friend is a being,
present, hearing, looking, a real being--the public is an invisible
being, a being of the reason, an abstraction; a friend has a name, and
the public is anonymous; a friend is a confidant, and the public is a
fiction. I blush before the one, because he is a man; I do not blush
before the other, because it is an idea. When I write or speak before the
public, I feel myself as free, as exempt from the susceptibilities of one
man to another, as if I were speaking or writing before God and in the
desert; the crowd is a solitude; you see it, you know that it exists, but
you know it only as a mass. As an individual it does not exist. Now this
modesty of which you speak, being the respect of one's self before some
other person, when there is no person distinct on account of the
multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because
the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her
with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification
of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the
exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of
the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse me of
violating mysteries before you?