Abstract
In the Cahiers de jeunesse, the unusually frank record of his thoughts kept by Renan shortly after he had left Saint-Sulpice and while he was preparing for advanced degrees at the Sorbonne, we find a curious series of reflections about the problem of style as he painfully experienced it. “Je ne suis pas encore,” he wrote, “à même de bien définir ma pensée. Elle n'a pas l'acumen nécessaire; je la vois se dessiner comme une pointe de poignard sous un voile, une statue sous un voile” (CV, p. 264). “Ah!” he cries, “que je trépigne de ne pouvoir transpirer tout l'acide de ma pensée” (CJ, p. 329); and then we discover surely one of the most startling prayers ever written by this man for whom prayer was later to become a minor literary genre, polished and somewhat affected: “Mon Dieu! que je souffre! exprime donc ma pensée avec le feu et le fiel qui rongent mon âme en la concevant, faute de pouvoir la jeter au dehors!” (CJ, p. 340). These utterances will serve to introduce us into a relatively little known but critically important period of Renan's formative years, when his prayer was somehow to be answered, the period from May 1848 until September 1850, during which he published, in the radically republican magazine known as the Liberté de penser, his first important essays.
Published Version
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