A third solution may offer itself to the writer: the use of that spare, almost abstract language, both circumspect and precise, which in France has for centuries served preachers, moralists, and often novelists in the classical period as well, as a vehicle for discussing what was termed at that time “the aberrations of the senses.” This traditional style for the examination of conscience lends itself so well to the formulation of innumerable nuances of judgment on a subject which is by its nature as complex as life itself that a Bourdaloue or a Massillon resorted to it for the expression of indignation or censure, and a Laclos for licentiousness or voluptuousness. By its very discretion, this decanted language has seemed to me especially appropriate for the pensive, scrupulous deliberations of Alexis, for his patient effort to free himself strand by strand—unknotting rather than breaking them—from the web of uncertainties and constraints in which he finds himself caught, for his modesty which includes a respect for sensuality itself, and for his firm desire to reconcile with dignity the spirit and the flesh.

Like every story written in the first person, Alexis is the portrait of a voice. It was necessary to let this voice have its own register, its own timbre, to remove from it, for example, none of the courtly inflections which seem somehow out of another age and already seemed so thirty-five years ago, nor to remove from it any of those virtually suppliant accents of tenderness which perhaps, in the end, say more about the relations between Alexis and his young wife than his confession itself. It was also necessary to permit this character certain opinions which today seem rather doubtful to the author but which retain their value for characterization. Alexis explains his penchants as the effect of a puritanical childhood completely dominated by women, possibly an accurate opinion so far as he is concerned and very important for him from the moment he accepts it, but one which (even if I believed it at the time, and I no longer recall whether I did or not) now seems to me the sort of explanation that tries artificially to place within the psychological methodology of our age deeds which probably go beyond that type of motivation. In the same way, Alexis’s preference for sexual pleasure enjoyed independently from love, his wariness of any prolonged attachment, is characteristic of a period in reaction against a whole century of romantic exaggeration: this point of view has been one of the most widespread in our day, whatever the sexual tastes have been of those who express it. One might respond to Alexis by observing that sexual pleasure isolated in this way runs the risk of turning into a dreary routine; even more, that there is a puritanical essence in this attempt to separate pleasure from the rest of human emotions, as if it were not worthy of belonging to them.