One September evening, the night before our return to Vienna, I surrendered to the attraction of the piano, which up to then had remained closed. I was alone in the drawing room, which was almost dark, and it was, as I have said, my last evening at Woroïno. For several long weeks, a physical disquiet had entered into me, a fever, and an insomnia which I fought against and which I attributed to the autumn. There is a moist, cool sort of music in which one can quench one’s thirst, or at least so I thought. I began to play. I played. At first I played with caution, softly, delicately, as if I were trying to put my soul to sleep. I had chosen the calmest pieces, pure mirrors of thought, Debussy or Mozart, and one would have said, as they did formerly in Vienna, that I was afraid of emotional music. Yet my soul, Monique, did not wish to sleep. Or perhaps it was not even the soul. I played vaguely, allowing each note to float over the silence. It was, as I have already said, my last evening at Woroïno. I knew that my hands would never again touch those keys, that this room would never again, because of me, be filled with music. I interpreted my physical ailments as a foreboding of death: I was resolved to let myself die. Abandoning my soul on the crest of arpeggios like a body on a wave when the wave breaks, I waited for the music to ease me toward the next descent into the abyss of oblivion. I played, overwhelmed. I told myself that I had to remake my life and that nothing, not even healing, could heal me. I felt too tired for such a succession of setbacks and efforts, both of them exhausting, and yet I was already taking pleasure, through the music, in my weakness and my surrender. I was no longer able, as I once had been, to despise the life of passion, even though I was afraid of it. My soul was more deeply embedded in my flesh, and what I regretted as I climbed back, from thought to thought, from musical phrase to musical phrase, toward my most intimate and least admitted past was not my transgressions but those opportunities for joy I had rejected. What I regretted was not having given in too often, but rather for too long and with too much vigor having struggled not to give in.