The last weeks of your pregnancy were painful. One evening, my sister-in-law came and told me that I should pray for you. I did not pray. I simply told myself over and over again that you were doubtless going to die. I was afraid of not feeling a sufficiently sincere despair: I felt, in advance, a sort of remorse. What is more, you were resigned to dying. You were resigned in the way people are when they do not especially care to go on living: in your placidity I saw a reproach. Perhaps you felt that our marriage was not destined to last for a lifetime and that you would end up loving someone else. When one is afraid of the future, it makes death seem easy. I held your hands, which were always slightly feverish, in mine. We both refrained from speaking in the presence of the mutual thought that you would quite possibly die; and you were so exhausted that you did not even ask what would become of the child. I told myself, in rebellion, that nature is unjust to those who obey her clearest laws, since every birth imperils two lives. Everyone causes suffering when he is born, and suffers when he dies. But that life is dreadful is nothing; what is worse is that it is vain and without beauty. The solemnity of a birth, like that of a death, is lost in repulsive or merely commonplace details for those who are in attendance. I was no longer admitted into your room: you struggled amid the cares and prayers of women, and since the lamps remained lighted all night, one was aware that someone was expected. Your cries, when I heard them beyond the closed doors, were almost inhuman and horrified me. I had never dreamed in advance that you would have to come to grips with such an animal form of suffering, and I hated this child who made you scream. Monique, one emotion leads to another, not only in everyday life, but within the depths of the soul also: the memory of those hours when I thought you were lost seems to have brought me back to where my instincts had always drawn me. I was ushered into your room to see the child. Now everything had become peaceful again; you were happy, but with a physical happiness comprised chiefly of fatigue and liberation. The child, however, was crying in the arms of the women. I suppose he suffered from the cold, from the noise of words, from the hands which took care of him, from the touch of the swaddlings. Life had snatched him away from the warm maternal shadows. He was afraid, I think, and nothing—not even night, not even death—would ever replace for him that truly primordial refuge, for death and night have cold shadows and are not animated by the beating of a heart. I felt so shy before that child I was supposed to embrace. He inspired in me not tenderness, nor even affection, but a great pity; for one does not ever know in the presence of newborn infants what cause for tears the future will give them.