You were in love with me. I am not vain enough to believe that you loved me with passion; I continue to ask myself how it was possible not so much that you fell in love with me as that you adopted me in that way. Each of us knows so little about love as other people understand it. For you, love was perhaps only an impassioned kindness. Or else, you were attracted to me. I attracted you precisely because of those good qualities which too often grow in the shade of our worst faults: weakness, indecision, subtlety. Above all, you felt sorry for me. I had been imprudent enough to inspire pity in you. Because you had been good to me for several weeks, you thought it would be natural to be so for the rest of your life: you thought it was enough to be perfect in order to be happy. I thought it enough, in order to be happy, not to be guilty any longer.

We were married at Wand one rainy day in October. Perhaps, Monique, I might have wished our engagement had been longer; I like to be borne along, not dragged, by the passage of time. I was not without anxieties about the existence which opened before me: remember that I was twenty-two years old and you were the first woman who preoccupied my life. But, with you beside me, everything was always very simple. I was so grateful to you for frightening me so little. The guests at the castle departed one after the other. We were going to depart also, together. We were married in the village church, and since your father had gone off on one of his distant expeditions, we had with us only some friends and my brother. My brother had come even though the trip was expensive; he thanked me almost effusively for having, as he put it, saved our family. I was aware that he was alluding to your fortune, and that filled me with shame. I did not answer. And yet, my dear, would I have been more culpable in sacrificing you to my family than in sacrificing you to myself? I remember that it was one of those days of intermittent sun and rain which, like a human face, easily change expression. It seemed to me that the day was trying to be fine and that I was trying to be happy. My God, I was happy. Timorously happy.

And here, Monique, there should be silence. Here my dialogue with myself should cease: here begins the dialogue of two united souls and bodies—united, or merely joined. To say everything, my dear, would require an audacity I forbid myself; above all, it would be necessary for me to be a woman as well. I would merely compare my memories with yours, relive, in a sort of slow motion, those moments of sadness or of painful joy that we lived out perhaps too hastily. All that comes back to me like vanished thoughts, like shy, whispered confidences, like very soft music you have to listen to in order to hear it. Let me see if it is not possible also to write in whispers.