My health, which had much improved, was no longer an obstacle; my mother, however, thought me too young. Perhaps she feared the temptations a freer life would expose me to. She imagined, I suppose, that life within the family had saved me from them. Many parents assume that. She understood that it was necessary for me to earn some money, but no doubt she thought that could wait. At that time I did not guess at the poignancy of her refusal. I was unaware that she did not have long to live.

One evening at Pressburg, shortly after the death of my sister, I returned home in greater disarray than usual. I had loved my sister a great deal. I do not pretend that her death afflicted me excessively; I was too tormented within myself to be terribly moved. Suffering turns us into egotists, for it absorbs us completely: it is later, in the form of memory, that it teaches us compassion. I came back a little earlier than I had intended; but I had not set a specific hour with my mother, and therefore she was not expecting me. As I opened the door, I found her sitting in the dark. In the last weeks of her life, my mother liked to sit and do nothing as night approached. It seemed almost as if she wished to accustom herself to immobility and darkness. I suppose her face took on then that calmer, more sincere expression we have when we are all alone and in complete darkness. I walked in. My mother did not like to be surprised in that way. She told me, as if to excuse herself, that the lamp had just gone out; but I put my hands on it; the glass was not even warm. She perceived clearly that something was wrong: when it is dark we are more clairvoyant because our eyes do not deceive us. Feeling my way, I took a seat near her. I was in a rather curious state of languor which I knew only too well. It felt as though a confession was going to pour out of me, involuntarily, like tears. I was doubtless on the verge of recounting everything, when the maid entered with another lamp.

Then I realized that I could say nothing more, that I would not be able to tolerate the expression my mother’s face would assume once she had understood me. This little bit of light spared me an irreparable, pointless error. Confidences, my dear, are always pernicious when their goal is not to simplify the life of another person.