How difficult it is not to be unfair to oneself! I said to you just now that my adolescence was untroubled. I believe it. I have often looked back at this rather puerile, sad past; I have tried to remember my thoughts, my feelings, more intimate than my thoughts, even my dreams. I have analyzed them to see if I might not discover some ominous meaning which had escaped me then, and whether I had not mistaken innocence of mind for innocence of heart. You know the ponds of Woroïno; you always say they are like great pieces of gray sky fallen to earth, which then strive to rise up again as mist. When I was a child I feared them. I already understood that everything has its secret, ponds as well as everything else; that peace, like silence, is never more than a surface, and that the worst of all falsehoods is the falsehood of calm. All my childhood, when I think back on it, seems to me a great calm on the edge of a great disquiet which is, in fact, the whole of life. I think back to incidents, too minuscule to recount, that I did not notice then but where I now perceive tremulous warnings—quiverings of the flesh and quiverings of the heart, like the breath of God the Bible speaks of. There are certain moments in our existence when we are, inexplicably and almost terrifyingly, what we shall later become. My dear, I seem to have changed so little. The odor of rain through an open window, the poplar woods in the fog, a piece of music by Cimarosa that old ladies asked me to play because, I suppose, it brought back their youth, or even a special quality of silence that I find only at Woroïno, are enough to cancel out all the thoughts, events, and sorrows which lie between me and that childhood. I could almost claim that the intervening time has lasted less than an hour, that it has been only one of those moments of half-sleep into which I so often fell then, during which neither life nor I had time to change ourselves very much. I have only to close my eyes: everything happens exactly as it did then; I find again, as if he had never left me, the timid, sweet young boy who did not believe in complaining and who resembles me so much that I suspect, perhaps unjustly, that he resembled me completely.