I played in despair. The human soul is slower than we are: that makes me admit that it may also be more durable. It is always a little behind our current life. I was only beginning to comprehend the meaning of my inner music, the music of joy and savage desire that I had stifled within me. I had reduced my soul to one single melody, plaintive and monotonous; I had filled my life with a silence out of which only psalms were permitted to rise. I do not have sufficient faith, my dear, to limit myself to psalms, and if I repent, it is of my repentance. Sounds, Monique, spread out into time like forms in space, and until a piece of music has ceased, it remains in part plunged in the future. There is something very moving for the improviser in the choice of which note will follow. I began to comprehend that liberty both art and life have when they obey only the laws of their own development. The rhythm followed the rise of my inner anguish; the auscultation is terrible when the heart beats too rapidly. What was now born out of the instrument in which my real self had been locked up for two years was no longer a chant of sacrifice, or even of desire, or of joy so near. It was hate: hate for everything that had falsified me and crushed me for so long. With a sort of cruel pleasure, I realized that you could hear me playing from your room: I told myself that that was sufficient as a confession and an explanation.