It was not a serious illness. It was my illness, which I was to know many more times and which I had known already. For each of us has his own illness, like his own hygiene and his own health, which it is difficult to diagnose with complete precision. It was a rather prolonged illness. It lasted several weeks; and, as always happens, it brought me a little calm. The images which had obsessed me during my fever went away with it; what remained was nothing more than a confusion of shame, similar to the bad taste that a bout of fever leaves behind, and the recollections of those images got all mixed up in my beclouded memory. Then, just as an obsessive thought will disappear for a moment only if another replaces it, I gradually saw my second obsession begin to grow. Death tempted me. It has always seemed to me fairly easy to die. My way of imagining death scarcely differed from my way of imagining love: I saw in it a failing, a defeat that would be sweet. From that time on, throughout my entire life, these two obsessions have never ceased to alternate within me; the one would heal me from the other, and no rational argument could heal me from both. I lay in my infirmary bed; I looked through the window at the gray wall of the neighboring courtyard as the raucous voices of children filled the air. I said to myself that life would forever be this gray wall, these raucous voices, and the distress of my hidden trouble. I told myself that nothing was worth it and that it was easy not to want to live any more. And slowly, as if it were some sort of answer I gave myself, music surged up within me. At first it was funereal music, but it soon ceased to be anything that fits that description; for death no longer makes any sense in a place life cannot reach, and this music floated high above both death and life. It was a peaceful music, peaceful because it was powerful. It filled the whole infirmary, swaying me like the rocking of a steady, slow groundswell, sensuously; I did not fight against it, and for an instant I felt calmed. I was no longer a sick young man frightened of himself: I felt myself become who I really was; for all of us would be transformed if we had the courage to be who we really are. Suddenly it seemed easy for me, who am too shy to seek or even endure applause, to become a great musician, to unveil to others this new music which pulsed within me like a heartbeat. One of the patients coughing in a far corner of the room interrupted this fantasy abruptly, and I realized that my pulse was, quite simply, racing too rapidly. I recovered. I knew the emotions of convalescence and its tears trembling on the fringe of eyelids. My sensibility, sharpened by suffering, was even more repulsed by the abrasions of school. I suffered from a lack of solitude and from a lack of music. All my life, music and solitude have had a calming influence upon me. The interior struggles which had taken place within me without my being aware of them, and the illness which had followed them, had exhausted my strength. I was so weak that I became very pious. I acquired that facile spirituality which is produced by all great weaknesses. It permitted me to despise even more sincerely what I told you about just now and what I started thinking about again. I could no longer live in an atmosphere that had been soiled for me. I wrote absurd letters to my mother, exaggerated yet true, in which I begged her to take me out of school. I told her that I was unhappy there, that I wanted to become a great musician, but that I would cost her no more money, that I would quickly become self-sufficient. And yet, in fact, school had become less hateful than it had been. Many of my schoolmates, who at the beginning had tormented me, now showed greater kindness toward me; I was so easy to please that I felt a great gratitude to them; I thought that I had been wrong, that they had not been wicked. I shall always remember a young boy to whom I had barely spoken, who, when he realized I was quite poor and that my family sent me almost nothing, insisted on sharing his sweets with me. I had become absurdly sensitive, which humiliated me; I had such a need for affection that it caused me to burst into tears, and I remember being ashamed of those tears, as if they were a sort of sin. From that day, we were friends. In other circumstances, the beginning of such a friendship would have made me want to put off my departure, but here, on the contrary, it confirmed my desire to get out, and as soon as possible. I wrote even more pressing letters to my mother. I begged her to take me away without delay. My mother was very good. She was always good to me. She came and got me herself. I should also explain that my tuition was expensive: each semester, it was a worry for my family. If my studies had been better, I doubt that they would have taken me out of school, but I did not do any work, and my brothers decided that it was money wasted. It seems to me they were not wholly wrong. The oldest had just got married; that had been an additional expense. When I got back to Woroïno, I saw that they had relegated me to a remote wing of the house, but naturally I did not complain. My mother insisted that I try to eat; she wanted to serve me herself; she smiled with that weak smile which seemed always to ask pardon that she could not do more than she did. Her fingers and her hands seemed to me as worn as her dress, and I observed that her fingers, whose delicacy I admired, were beginning to be spoiled by work, like those of a quite poor woman. I was aware that I had disappointed her, that she had hoped for me something other than a future as a musician, quite probably a mediocre musician at that. But, nonetheless, she was content to see me again. I did not tell her my schoolboy sorrows; by now they seemed to me completely imaginary compared to the difficulties and efforts that mere existence represented for my family; in any case, it was a difficult thing to talk about. I even came to feel a kind of respect for my brothers. They administered what was still called the domain; that was more than I did or ever would do; and I began vaguely to understand that that had its importance.