My health, which was still precarious, worried you all the more since I did not complain about it. You were resolved that we should spend our first months together in milder climates: the very day of our marriage, we set out for Merano. Subsequently, winter drove us toward even warmer lands; I saw for the first time the sea, and the sea bathed in sunlight. But that is unimportant. On the contrary, I should have preferred other regions, sadder, more austere, which harmonized with the existence that I was determined to wish to live. Those carefree countries of bodily happiness caused me distress and confusion; I was always suspicious that joy contained a sin. The more my conduct seemed reprehensible to me, the more I clung to rigorous moral standards which condemned my acts. Our theories, Monique, when they are not the formulation of our instincts, are the defenses with which we oppose our instincts. I was annoyed at you for making me notice the deep red heart of a rose, a statue, the dusky beauty of a passing child; I experienced a sort of ascetic horror at these innocent things. For the same reason, I should have preferred you to be less beautiful.

We had put off, with a sort of tacit understanding, the moment when we would be completely each other’s. I thought about it in advance with some disquiet, with revulsion also; I feared that so great an intimacy was going to spoil or debase something. Then, too, one never knows what the sympathies or antipathies of the body will bring about between two people. Doubtless, such ideas were not very healthy, but nevertheless those are the ideas I had. Every evening, I would ask myself whether I dared join you. My dear, I did not dare. Finally, I really had to: otherwise, you surely would not have understood. I think, with a certain sadness, how much more another person would have appreciated the beauty— the goodness—of that gift, so utterly simple, of yourself. I would not wish to say anything which might risk shocking you, even less making you smile, but it seems to me that it was a maternal gift. Later, when I saw your child nestle against you, I thought that every man, without knowing it, seeks in women above all the memory of the time when his mother embraced him. That, at least, is the case for me. I recall with infinite pity your rather troubled efforts to reassure me, to console me, perhaps to cheer me up; and I almost think I was your first child.