Once again, I find myself on the verge of a confession; it would be better to make it quickly and simply. To be sure, my sisters also had girlfriends who lived with us almost like members of the family and of whom I came to think myself the younger brother. Nothing would appear to have prevented me from loving one of these girls, and perhaps you yourself find it strange that I did not. Yet the fact is, it was impossible. An intimacy so familial, so peaceful, took away the curiosities and inquietudes of desire, even supposing I had been capable of them. I don’t think the word “veneration,” which I used a little while ago, is excessive when it is applied to a very good woman: I less and less believe it is excessive. I already had a suspicion (I even exaggerated it to myself) of how brutal the physical acts of love can be. It would have repelled me to join these images of domestic, rational, perfectly austere and pure life with other more passionate ones. One does not lose one’s heart to what one respects, nor perhaps even to what one loves; above all, one does not lose one’s heart to what resembles oneself—and it was not women I was most different from. You have the merit, my dear, not only of being able to understand everything but of being able to understand everything before it has been said. Monique, do you understand me?

I do not know when I myself first understood. Certain details, which I really cannot give you, indicate to me it must go very far back, even to the first memories of being, and that dreams are often the harbingers of desire. But an instinct is not yet a temptation; it simply makes temptation possible. Just now I appeared to explain my penchants by external influences. They certainly contributed to establishing them; yet I see clearly that one should always go back to much more intimate explanations, much more obscure ones, which we understand imperfectly because they are hidden within us. Having such instincts is not enough to explain the cause, and no one, after all, can explain that completely; therefore, I shall not insist. I would simply claim that these instincts, precisely because they were natural to me, were able to develop for a long time without my being aware of it. People who speak from hearsay are almost always wrong, because they look on from the outside and they perceive crudely. And they never imagine that the acts they judge reprehensible can be at once easy and spontaneous, as in fact most human acts are. They inveigh against the example set, the moral contagion, and they draw back only from the difficulty of explaining. They do not realize that nature is more diverse than we imagine; they do not wish to know that, because it is easier for them to be indignant than to think. They praise purity. They do not know how much anxiety purity can contain; they are, above all, unaware of the frankness of need. Between my fourteenth and sixteenth year, I had fewer young friends than formerly, because I was exceedingly withdrawn. Nevertheless, as I realize today, I was once or twice almost happy in complete innocence. I shall not explain what circumstances prevented me: that is too delicate a matter, and I have too much to say to linger over circumstances.