He had never looked at himself in a mirror, except fully clothed and just about to go out. He thought he looked very ugly beneath the black trousers. . . and yet his playmates were so proud to be wearing them for the first time.

And what was more, the tailor also considered that the suit he had made him didn’t fit very well. Something, below the belt was making an unsightly bulge. The tailor whispered a few embarrassed words to Marcueil’s mother, who blushed, and he vaguely perceived that he had some deformity – otherwise they wouldn’t have been whispering in front of him – that he wasn’t built like everyone else.

To be built like everyone else when he was grown up became an obsession with him.

“On the right,” the tailor was saying mysteriously, like someone trying not to alarm a sick person. He no doubt thought that André’s heart was on the right side.

But how could the heart be below the belt, even in a grownup?

The tailor stood perplexed, absently stroking the onwonted place with his thumb.

A new fitting the next day, after alterations and with new measurements, still produced no better fit.

For, between the left side and the right, there is one direction: above.

André’s mother, like all born mothers, and even the other sort, wanted him to be a soldier. He swore that he would never again be the cause of a tailor’s misfit, and calculated that he still had eight years left in which to correct his deformity before the shameful day when he would be obliged to reveal it before the conscription board.

As he remained assiduously chaste, he had no opportunity of learning whether it really was a deformity.

And when he did start going with girls – a ritual after taking the first part of the baccalaureate exam, and André was a year ahead of his class – the girls must have thought that, like all men, he was only a “man” at certain times, since he only went up to their rooms “for a moment.”

For five years the prose of the Church haunted him:

Hostemque nostrum comprime. . .

For five years he took bromides and various other preparations and tried to exhaust himself by physical exercise, with the sole result of making himself exceedingly strong. He bound himself with thongs and slept on his stomach, pitting against the revolt of the Beast all the weight of his thick, athletic body.

Later, much later, he reflected that his efforts were perhaps only directed toward bridling a force that would never have revealed itself had it not had a destiny to accomplish.

Then, as a reaction, he had mistresses frantically, but neither he nor they took any pleasure in it: what for him was such a “natural” need was for them just a chore.