I had no one of whom I could ask advice. The first consequence of forbidden inclinations is to wall us up within ourselves. One must keep silent or speak only to fellow accomplices. In my efforts to conquer myself, I suffered a good deal from not being able to hope for either encouragement or pity, or even for that bit of esteem that good will always merits. I had never been intimate with my brothers; my mother, who was pious and sad, had touching illusions about me; she would have hated to have me destroy the terribly pure, terribly sweet, somewhat mawkish idea she had conceived of her child. If I had dared confess to my family, what they would have been able to pardon least would have been precisely the confession itself. I would have placed these scrupulous people in an awkward situation, which ignorance spared them. I would have been scrutinized; I would not have been helped. In family life, our role is fixed once and for all by its relationship to the roles of others. One is the son, the brother, the husband, and so on. This role belongs to us like our name, the state of health we are thought to have, and the deference we are, or are not, supposed to be shown. The rest is of no importance; the rest is our life. Sometimes at the table, or in a tranquil drawing room, I had moments of agony when I thought I would die. I was surprised that no one perceived them. It seems at such times that the space stretching between us and the members of our family is uncrossable: one struggles in solitude as if at the center of a crystal. I came to believe that these people were wise enough to understand, not to intervene, and not to be surprised. Such a hypothesis, if one thinks about it, could perhaps explain God. But when it concerns ordinary mortals, it is useless to attribute wisdom to them: blindness is enough.

If you think about my family life as I have described it to you, you can understand how this environment was as dreary as an endless November. I imagined that a less sad existence would also be more pure; I thought as well, correctly, that nothing pushes us to the excesses of our instincts like the regularity of a life which is conventionally correct. We passed the winter at Pressburg. The health of one of my sisters necessitated our living in town because of the proximity of doctors. My mother, who did her best to contribute to my future, had insisted that I take harmony lessons; everyone said that I had made enormous progress. Certainly, I worked the way people work when they are seeking refuge in an occupation. The musician who taught me (he was a rather mediocre man, but full of good will) advised my mother to send me abroad to complete my musical education. I knew existence there would be hard; and yet I longed to go. We are attached by so many ties to the places where we have lived that it seems to us that, by leaving them, we can more easily leave ourselves.