There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.

Jules Renard (1864–1910), a French novelist and diarist associated with the fin-de-siècle literary scene, is especially known for the aphoristic observations recorded in his Journal. The quoted line reflects the dry, skeptical wit that runs through those diary entries: brief, epigrammatic sentences that puncture sentimentality and expose the precariousness of comfort. Renard’s Journal, kept over many years and published posthumously, often turns everyday moods—success, calm, happiness—into occasions for irony, suggesting that good fortune is temporary and that human beings are quick to distrust it.

The remark is a comic inversion of reassurance: instead of telling us not to worry because things will improve, Renard tells us not to be alarmed by happiness because it will pass. Its humor depends on fatalistic realism—life’s equilibrium is unstable, and periods of ease are exceptions rather than the rule. The line can be read as a critique of naïve optimism and as a portrait of modern anxiety: even when circumstances are favorable, the mind anticipates reversal. At the same time, it hints at a stoic consolation—if trouble returns, it is part of the ordinary cycle, not a personal catastrophe.