*L’ordre du jour pour le roi.*12 – The day begins: let us begin to organize for this day the business and festivities of our most gracious master who is still deigning to repose. His majesty has bad weather today: we shall be careful not to call it bad; we shall not speak of the weather – but we shall be a bit more ceremonious about the business than would otherwise be necessary and a bit more festive about the festivities. His majesty may even be ill: at breakfast we shall present the latest good news of last evening, the arrival of Mr Montaigne, who jokes so agreeably about his illness; he’s suffering from a stone.13 We shall receive a few persons (persons! What that puffed-up old frog who will be among them would say if he heard this word! ‘I am not a person’, he would say, ‘but always the matter itself’14) – and this reception will take longer than anyone finds agreeable: that is reason enough to tell about the poet who wrote on his door, ‘Whoever enters here will pay me an honour; whoever does not – a pleasure.’15 Truly a polite way to express a rudeness! And perhaps this poet is for his part quite right in being rude: they say his poems are better than their maker. Well, then let him write many more and withdraw himself from the world as much as possible – that is after all the meaning of his civil incivility! Conversely, a prince is always worth more than his ‘verse’, even if – but what are we doing? We are gossiping and the whole court thinks we are already working and racking our brains – one sees no light earlier than the one burning in our window. Listen! Wasn’t that the bell? Damn! The day and the dance are beginning and we don’t know the programme! So we have to improvise – the whole world improvises its day. Let’s just do today as the whole world does! And there my strange morning dream vanished, probably the victim of the hard strokes of the tower bell, which just announced the fifth hour with all of its customary importance. It seems to me that this time the god of dreams wanted to poke fun at my habit of starting the day by organizing it and making it tolerable to myself, and it may well be that I have often done this in too formal and princelike a manner.