The winter, then the spring, went by. Our excesses of grief had worn us out as much as a great debauch. We came to know that aridity in the heart which follows excessive tears, and my dejection seemed like calmness. I was almost terrified to feel myself so calm; I believed that I had triumphed over myself. One is always so ready, alas, to become disgusted with one’s own triumphs. We attributed our despondency to the exhaustion of traveling; and so we took up residence in Vienna. I felt a certain repugnance in coming back to that city where I had lived alone. But you, with tender delicacy, were determined not to take me too far away from my own country. I tried to believe that I would be less unhappy in Vienna than I had been before; but, above all, I was less free. I let you choose the furnishings and the curtains for our rooms; with a certain bitterness, I watched you coming and going in those still-empty rooms in which our two existences would be imprisoned. Viennese society was taken with your dark, pensive beauty: the social world, which neither you nor I were used to, gave us a little time to forget how alone we were. But then we tired of it. We developed a kind of determination to endure boredom in that house which was too new, whose objects had no memories for us, whose mirrors did not know us. My effort at virtue and your attempt at love did not even manage to serve as a distraction for us.

Everything, even a moral failure, has its advantages for a mind that is even faintly lucid; it provides a less conventional view of the world. My less solitary life and my reading of books taught me the difference that exists between external conformity and inner morality. Men do not say the whole truth about themselves, but when, like me, one has been forced into the habit of certain reticences, one very quickly perceives that they are universal. I had acquired a singular aptitude for guessing hidden vices or weaknesses. My conscience, stripped naked, revealed to me the conscience of others. No doubt, those with whom I compared myself would have been indignant at such a comparison. They thought of themselves as normal, perhaps because their vices were so ordinary; nonetheless, could I deem them truly superior to me, in their search for pleasure which culminated only in itself and which, most often, did not envisage a child? I was finally able to tell myself that my only mistake (or, rather, my only unhappiness) was to be, certainly not worse than everyone, but only different. And yet many people accommodate themselves to instincts like mine; it is neither so rare nor so strange. I hated myself for having tragically accepted precepts which so many examples contradict— and human morality is nothing more than one great compromise. Dear God, I blame no one. Everyone broods in silence over his own secrets and dreams, without ever admitting them, even to himself, and everything would be made plain if one did not lie. Thus, I had tortured myself with very little cause. Having conformed to the strictest rules of morality, I now gave myself the right to judge them. And one could say that my thoughts dared to be freer from the very moment when I abandoned all freedom in my life.