What I had experienced was not at all love, and even less a passion. Ignorant as I was, I recognized this. It was an involvement that I was able to believe was completely external to me. I placed all the responsibility for it on the person who had merely shared it; I persuaded myself that my separation from him had been voluntary and was meritorious. I knew very well that that was not true, but then, it might have been: we can dupe our memory also. As a result of repeating to ourselves what we should have done, we end up finding it impossible to believe that we have not done it. Vice for me consisted in the habit of sin; I did not know that it is more difficult to give in once than never to give in. Explaining away my fault as, in effect, the result of circumstances to which I vowed never to expose myself again, I in some way separated it from myself in order to see it as nothing more than an accident. My dear, I must confess everything to you: after having sworn never to repeat it, I regretted a little less having done it once.

I shall spare you the recital of new transgressions which destroyed my illusion that I had been only half guilty. You will reproach me for being so self-indulgent about my memories; perhaps you are right. I am now so far away from the adolescent that I was, from his ideas, from his sufferings, that I am drawn toward him with a sort of affection; I should like to feel sorry for him, and even to console him. This feeling, Monique, leads me to reflect: I wonder if it is not the memory of our own youth that seduces us in the presence of the youth of others. I was terrified at the facility with which I, so shy, so slow to comprehend, managed to foresee potential complicities; I was ashamed not so much of my faults as of the tawdry circumstances, as if it were up to me alone to choose less contemptible ones. I was deprived of the relief of feeling irresponsible: I knew very well that my acts were voluntary, but then I only willed them at the moment when I was actually achieving them. One would have said that instinct, in order to take hold of me, waited until my conscience had faded away or closed her eyes. One after another, I yielded to two contradictory impulses of will which did not clash with each other because they came one after the other. And yet sometimes an occasion offered itself that I did not seize: I was shy. In that way, my triumphs over myself constituted only another defeat; our defeats are sometimes the best adversaries we can pit against our vices.