In my room, I had one of those little old-fashioned mirrors which are always a bit blurred, as if a breath had clouded the glass. Since such an important thing had taken place within me, I naively thought I ought to have changed. But the mirror gave back only my ordinary image, an uncertain, timorous, pensive face. I passed my hand over it, less to wipe away the trace of a touch than to assure myself that it was indeed I. What perhaps makes sensual pleasure so terrible is that it teaches us we have a body. Up to that point, it has served us only for living. Then we realize that this body has its own special existence, its own dreams, its own will, and that until our death we shall have to take account of it, give in to it, negotiate with it, or struggle against it. We feel (we believe we feel) that our soul is only its finest dream. Sometimes, alone, before a mirror which redoubled my anguish, it would occur to me to ask what I had in common with my body, with its pleasures or its ills, as if I did not belong to it. But I do belong to it, my dear. This body, which appears so fragile, is nonetheless more durable than my virtuous resolutions, perhaps even more durable than my soul, for often the soul dies in advance of the body. That phrase, Monique, will no doubt shock you more than my entire confession; for you believe in the immortality of the soul. Forgive me if I am less sure than you, or if I have less pride; at times, the soul seems to me nothing more than a simple respiration of the body.

I believed in God. I had a very human conception of Him—that is to say, very inhuman—and I judged myself an abomination before Him. Life, which alone teaches us about life, explains to us also the books we have read. Certain passages of the Bible that I had read carelessly took on for me a new intensity; they panicked me. Sometimes I said to myself that it had happened, that nothing could have prevented its having happened, and that I could only resign myself to it. Such a thought was like that of damnation: it calmed me. There is a certain release at the bottom of all great helplessness. I promised myself only that it would never happen again; I swore it to God—as if God accepted oaths. My sin had as its only witness my accomplice, and he was no longer there. It is the opinion of others that gives our acts a sort of reality. Mine, unknown by anyone, had little more reality than the deeds done in a dream. I could have claimed, so much did my exhausted mind take refuge in lies, that nothing at all had taken place: it is, after all, no more ridiculous to deny the past than to pledge the future.