On the Boulevards—3.20 du matin. Reading the Sourire for strumpet-house items—I want to find me a Ballon of Champagne—First of all—préservatif right to my left around corner Rue Faubourg de Montmartre; all-night pharmacy.
Along the quais again this afternoon to the bookstalls—Made afraid by the junk—Bought a dozen books or so, but no “prints” or “etchings”—Countless old-fashioned prints—pictures of Versailles—the Palais Royal, the Revolution—Sentimental and cheap pictures—Florid ones—“La Courtisane Passionnée,” etc. Stage-coach pictures, etc. Works of Eugène Scribe—The little books bound or tied, so you can’t look—nothing in them—Vie à la Campagne—countless cheap books—ah, I have a little of it all!—Strasbourg.
Christmas Week—Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine—Written on the Spot.
The Isenheimer Altar of Mathias Grünewald in the Cloisters of the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar:
There is nothing like it in the world. I have spent over 4 months getting here—it is much more wonderful than one imagines it will be. The altar is set up not in one piece but in three sections in a big room with groined ceilings, a long groined room like a Dominikaner Cloister.
The first two “volets” of the altar—Everything is distorted and out of perspective. The figure of the Christ is twice as big as the other figures—the pointing finger of Saint Antoine is much too big for his body—but everything in this figure points along the joints and elbows of that arm and ends in the pointing finger.
The Lamb with its straight brisk feet, its dainty right foreleg bent delicately about the Cross and red blood spouting from its imperturbable heart into a goblet of rich gold, is a masterpiece of symbolic emotion that strikes far beyond intelligence.
The body of Christ, and its agony, are indescribable. The hands and the feet are enlarged to meet the agony—the hands are tendons of agony, the feet are not feet but lengths of twisted tendons driven through by a bolt and ending in bent, broken, bleeding toes. A supernatural light falls upon the immense twisted length of the body (a grey-white-green) and yet completely solid light—you can count the ribs, the muscles (the head falling to the right), full of brutal agony—it is crowned with long thorns and rusty blood—it droops over, it is too big, Christ is dead.
The great figure of the woman in white comes up and breaks backward
