I have not yet said how much you wanted a son. I, too, passionately wanted one. Nevertheless, when I knew that we were to have a child I felt very little joy. No doubt, childless marriage is only an allowed debauch. If a woman’s love merits a respect which a man’s does not, that is perhaps only because it contains a future. But it is not at the moment when life seems absurd and deprived of any goal that one can rejoice in perpetuating it. The child we had dreamed of together was going to come into the world among two strangers: he was neither the proof nor the fulfillment of happiness, but its compensation. We vaguely hoped that everything would be all right as soon as he was there, and I had wanted him because you were sad. At first, you even felt some shyness in speaking to me of him; that, more than anything else, shows how much our lives had remained distant. And yet this tiny being began to help us. I thought of him rather as if he were the child of someone else. I savored the sweetness of our intimacy which had once again become fraternal and no longer required any passion. It seemed to me that you were virtually my sister, or some near relative who had been entrusted to me and whom I had to take care of, reassure, and perhaps console for an absence. You grew to love enormously this little creature who was already alive, at least for you. My own contentment, which was so apparent, was not stripped of egotism either: not having known how to make you happy, I found it natural to hope that the child would bring you happiness. Daniel was born in June at Woroïno in the melancholy countryside of the Montagne Blanche where I myself had been born. We were eager that he should come into the world in this landscape of the past: for you, it was a way of giving me more completely my son. The house, even though restored and newly painted, was the same as ever: it seemed merely to have become much larger, only because we were so many fewer. My brother (I had only one brother left) lived there with his wife. They were very provincial people whom solitude had made uncouth and poverty fearful. They welcomed you with a rather awkward eagerness, and as the trip had tired you, they offered you the honor of the large bedroom where my mother had died and we had been born. Your hands, resting on the whiteness of the sheets, looked almost like hers; every morning, as in the days when I used to come in to see my mother, I waited for those long, fragile fingers to be placed on my head in blessing. But I could not ask for such a thing: I contented myself with simply kissing them. And yet I had such great need of that blessing. The room was rather dark, with a state bed hung with heavy curtains. I imagine that many women of my family in times past had lain there to await their child or their death—and death is perhaps nothing more than giving birth to a soul.