I was not happy. I felt, of course, a certain disappointment in this lack of happiness, but in the end I resigned myself to it. In some fashion, I had renounced happiness, or at least joy. And then I told myself that the first months of a marriage are rarely the sweetest, that two people, abruptly joined by life, cannot so rapidly absorb themselves into each other and become truly one. That requires a great deal of patience and good will. We had both. I told myself, with even greater justice, that we are not owed any joy, and that it is wrong for us to complain. Everything would seem better, I suppose, if we were reasonable, and happiness is perhaps only an unhappiness which is better tolerated. I told myself that, because courage consists in accepting things when we cannot change them. And yet, if there is something lacking in life, or merely in ourselves, it is not any less significant, and we suffer from it just as much. And you, too, my dear, you were not happy either.

You were twenty-four years old. That was, roughly, the age of my older sisters. But, unlike them, you were not withdrawn or shy: you possessed an admirable vitality. You were not born for an existence of small sorrows or little happinesses; you were too powerful. As a young girl, you had conceived an idea of your married life which was exceedingly severe and grave, an ideal of tenderness more affectionate than loving. Nevertheless, without being aware of it yourself, into the strict routine of those dull and often difficult duties which, according to you, were to comprise your whole future, you inserted something else. Custom does not permit women passion: it permits them only love, and that is perhaps why they love so completely. I dare not say that you were born for a life of pleasure; there is something in that word which is sinful, or at least forbidden; I should rather say, my dear, that you were born to know and to give joy. One must endeavor to become sufficiently pure to encompass all the innocence of joy, that sun-drenched form of happiness. You had thought that giving it would be enough to get it back in return. I do not claim that you were disappointed: it takes a great deal of time for a woman’s feeling to change itself into thought: you were merely sad.