My character changed. I become moody, difficult, irritable; it seemed as though one virtue had given me dispensation from the others. I became vexed with you for not succeeding in giving me the calm I had counted on and which was, dear God, all that I asked for. I acquired the habit of semi-confidences; I tortured you with confessions all the more distressing in that they were incomplete. We found in tears a sort of miserable satisfaction; our mutual unhappiness managed to bring us together as much as happiness. You, too, changed. It seemed I had robbed you of your former serenity without managing to appropriate it for myself. Like me, you had impatiences and sudden sadnesses, impossible to understand; we became no more than two invalids leaning on each other.

I had completely abandoned music. Music was a part of the world in which I was resigned never to live again. They say that music is the realm of the soul; that may be, my dear: it simply proves that soul and flesh are not separable, that one contains the other, the way a keyboard contains sounds. The silence which follows music is not at all like ordinary silences: it is a heedful silence; it is a living silence. Many unsuspected things whisper within us through this silence, and we never know what the piece of music that has ended is going to tell us. A painting, a statue, even a poem, gives us precise ideas which usually take us no further, but music speaks to us of limitless possibilities. It is dangerous to expose oneself to emotions in art when one has resolved to abstain from them in life. Therefore, I ceased to play and to compose. I am not one of those who ask of art the compensation of pleasure; I love the one and the other, but not the one for the other—these two rather sad forms of all human desire. I no longer composed. My revulsion against life gradually extended to those dreams of an ideal life; for a work of art, Monique, is a dream of life. That simple joy which the achievement of a work of art gives every artist dried up within me, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it froze within me. That was perhaps the result of the fact that you were not a musician: my renunciation, my fidelity, would not have been complete if I had participated every evening in a world of harmony which you could not enter. I ceased to work. I was poor; until my marriage, I had had difficulty making an adequate living. Now I discovered a sort of voluptuousness in depending on you, even on your fortune. This rather humiliating situation was a sort of guarantee against the old sin. We all, Monique, have certain strange assumptions. It is merely cruel to deceive a woman who loves us, but it would be hateful to be unfaithful to one on whose money we live. And you, so cautious, did not dare blame me openly for my complete inactivity. You feared that I would see in your words a criticism of my poverty.