The birth of Daniel did not bring us any closer together: it disappointed us as much as love had. We did not take up again our shared existence; I had ceased to nestle against you at night like a child who has fear of the dark, and I took back the room where I slept when I was sixteen years old. In that bed, where I found, along with my past dreams, the hollow my body had formerly made, I had the sense of rejoining myself. My dear, we are wrong to think that life changes us; it wears us away, and that which it wears away in us are the things we have learned. I had not changed; it was just that events had interposed themselves between me and my own nature. I was what I had always been, perhaps more profoundly so than before, because to the extent that we lose one after another our illusions and our beliefs, we come to know better our true being. So many efforts and so much good will ended in my discovering that I was what I had always been: a rather troubled soul, whom two years of virtue had disillusioned. Monique, that is disheartening. The long maternal labor which had been accomplished in you seemed to bring your nature back to its pristine simplicity: you were, as you had been before marriage, a young person who wished for happiness, yet steadier now, calmer, and less burdened with soul. Your beauty had acquired a sort of abundant peace; it was I, now, who knew that I was ill, and I congratulated myself for it. A sense of shame will always prevent me from telling you how many times during those summer months I desired to die; nor do I wish to know if, when you compared yourself to happier women, you held it against me for having ruined your future. And yet we loved each other, as much as one can love without any passion for each other; the summer (it was the second since our marriage) was coming to an end a little hastily, as summers do in northern countries. We managed to savor in silence the end of a summer and of an affection, both of which had borne fruit and now had only to die. It was in the midst of this sadness that music came back to me.