Céline's Diary (1913)

The following is a translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s diary written whilst serving in the 12th Cuirassier Regiment.

I cannot say what prompts me to write down what I think.

To whoever reads these pages,

This sad November evening takes me back thirteen months ago to the time of my arrival in Rambouillet, far from suspecting what awaited me in this charming stay. Have I changed a lot in a year?… I believe so, because the life of the neighbourhood, instead of plunging me in a (rage... with sadness and languor) state from which I only emerged when my mind was full of dreams, alas, never achievable, while today, completely shaped by the sad life we lead, I am imbued with a melancholy in which I live like a bird in the air or a fish in the water. I have never been as erudite in any subject as well.

These notes, which are, as can be judged, of a diaphanous pallor, are purely personal, and are for the sole purpose of marking an era in my life (perhaps a full one), the first really painful one that I have passed through, but perhaps not the last. It is at random that I fill these pages. They will be noted and marked with a different state of mind according to the day or the hour, because since my incorporation I have undergone sudden physical and moral changes.

October 3 - Arrival - Guard corps filled with NCOs with overwhelming looks. Blustering mutts. Incorporation into a platoon of the 4th Lt. Le Moyne, a good boy, Coujon [?] nasty, as fake as a poker chip… (Text missing). Baron de Lagrange (a sincere and good officer, but slightly affected in morale by a nervousness and subject to attacks, the causes of which I believe should be sought in the excessive drinking of the youth).

It is surrounded by this colorful staff that I take my first steps in military life. Without forgetting Servat, an old worn out dog... crude and rough, mixing to a boastful southerner's glibness a cunning and a strange egotism. No kindness will be too much for him and how many times I have mixed my own troubles with his or those I create for him or to spare him.

From the debts I owe to the thefts I didn't want to notice, mixed in with all this is a deep nostalgia for freedom, a state not very preparatory to facilitate you for military training.

Such horrible awakenings to the so falsely cheerful sounds of the trumpets of the guard presenting you with the spirit of the resentments and horrors of a blue day.

These descents to the stables in the morning mist. The racing rhythm of the gallops on going up to the stable duty in the half-light. What a noble profession, the profession of arms. In fact the real sacrifices consist perhaps in the handling of manure in the pale light of a filthy lantern?

During the course of training the brigadier students, we were sickened by a young officer full of blood and the sarcasm of a moronic NCO with an innate fear of horses, I did not last long and I seriously began to consider desertion, which became the only way out of this ordeal.

So many times I came back from the grooming and all alone on my bed, taken by an immense despair, I cried like a girl at her first communion despite being seventeen years old. Then I felt that I was empty, that my energy was all talk and that in the bottom of myself there was nothing, that I was not a man as I had believed myself so much for a long time. Maybe there are a lot like my younger self, perhaps many still believe it, although if older and in the same circumstances would also feel their hearts to be left adrift like a bottle in the sea tossed by the waves from the insults and the belief that it will never end, so there I really suffered from the present evil as well as from my virile inferiority and to have to see it. I felt that the great speeches I had made a month earlier about youthful energy were only bluster and that at the foot of the wall I was only an unfortunate transplantee having lost half of his powers and using those which remain only to see the nothingness of this energy. It was then in the depths of my abyss that I was able to make a few studies on myself and on my soul, which I believe cannot be scrutinized thoroughly when it has been fighting. In the same way in the catastrophes one sees the best men of the world trample the women and debase themselves like the last of the vagabonds. In the same way I saw my soul suddenly stripped of illusion, of the stoicism with which my conviction had covered it to oppose (only its poor [...] in fight with the sad reality for which I) [...]. (Text missing)

What in the world is sadder than a December afternoon on a Sunday in the suburbs? And yet this sadness which plunges me into a deep melancholy, which is hard for me to get out of and it seems to me that my soul is softened that only in such circumstances I can see myself as I am. I am not poetic! I do not believe it is alone, a foundation of sadness which is in the depths of myself and if I don't have the courage to expel it by some activity, it soon takes enormous proportions to the point that this deep melancholy does not delay to cover all my troubles and melts together with them to torture me OR my interior self.

I am of complex and sensitive feelings, the least fault of tact or delicacy shocks me and makes me suffer because deep inside me, even I hide a depth of pride which makes me scared of myself, I want to dominate not by a factitious power as in ascendancy within the military but I want that in the future or as soon as possible to be a complete man, would I ever be, would I have the fortune to have that effortlessness that allows you to train yourself. I want to obtain by my own means a situation of fortune which grants me all my fantasies (Alas) would I be eternally free and alone having what I believe is a heart too complicated to find a companion that I can love for a long time. I do not know. But what I want above all is to live a life full of experiences that I hope providence will want to place on my way and not to end up like so many who having placed a single pole of continuity, formless upon a fixed landscape who live a life of which they do not know the detours that allow you to make a moral education. If I cross great crises that my life has reserved for me, perhaps I will be less unhappy than another, because I want to know them and to know in a word I am proud. If it is a defect, I do not believe so and if it will create me setbacks or perhaps the Success.