I was very happy and I said to him, “Do it again. Think about yourself, not me. I’m too tired to come again. But I want to feel you in me and feel that you’re happy.” And he must have understood that this was a present. He simply rolled me over and put his cheek on my breast, and then he was inside me. It was a quiet, enjoyable fuck, like between a couple that’s had a lot of practice fucking together, and it was nice the way he came: with a moan of surrender. I couldn’t see him in the dark (we’d put the light out so we could sleep), but I know how they come—they look so wild, as if they wanted to bite God in heaven, and yet it’s their only human moment.

We fell asleep, and it was still dark when he woke me up. I sensed that he was dressed and I was scared to death and I said, “You’re not leaving me!” And he caressed me and kissed me and calmed me. He would only be gone for a couple of hours, until I’d slept enough, then he’d come and pick me up, he said. He just had to put his things in order. “Il faut que j’arrange ma maison,” he said. And I believed him and I kissed him and said, “Hurry up, I won’t be able to sleep a wink till you come back.”

But then, when he closed the door behind him, I got scared, and I jumped out of bed and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around me and ran after him into the corridor and only caught up with him on the stairs. And when he said, “I’ll wait for you here, hurry up,” I ran back into the room and just pulled on my shoes and skirt and sweater and coat. I stuffed the stockings and the garter belt and the bra into my handbag. I really hurried. But he was already gone.

It is night. In a shabby hotel on the place des Ternes, in a small room with flowery wallpaper, he sits at a dressing table with a covered mirror.

The room does not face the street, it faces an air shaft. It is now the only room in which a lamp is lit. He writes, Il arrange sa maison.

He has four folders in front of him. They are marked “Pneuma” and “A,” “B,” and “C.” Two suitcases and several cartons of papers surround him on the floor. He occasionally rummages in one of them, takes out a sheet, and inserts it into one of the folders; then he busily continues writing.

The first folder is open. It says:

The most extreme language of madness is reason, but sheathed in the enchantment of the image, restricted to the phenomenal space that it defines—whereby both of them create, outside the totality of images and the universality of speech, a peculiar abusable organization, whose obstinate specificity constitutes madness.