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When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky but held back by the chill of those last autumn mornings, so luminous and so cold, which herald winter, in order to look at the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few strokes of gold or pink which seemed to have been left in the air, on an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a chrysalis in the process of metamorphosis, I was a dual creature whose different parts were not adapted to the same environment; for my eyes colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour. I got up only after my fire had been lighted, and studied the picture, so delicate and transparent, of the pink and golden morning, to which I had now added by artificial means the element of warmth that it lacked, poking my fire which burned and smoked like a good pipe and gave me, as a pipe would have given me, a pleasure at once coarse because it was based upon a material comfort and delicate because behind it were the soft outlines of a pure vision. The walls of my dressing-room were papered in a violent red, sprinkled with black and white flowers to which it seemed that I should have some difficulty in growing accustomed. But they succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing me to enter not into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating the gaiety and the songs of my morning ablutions; they succeeded only in imprisoning me in the heart of a sort of poppy, out of which to look at a world which I saw quite otherwise than in Paris, from the gay screen which was this new dwelling-place, of a different aspect from the house of my parents, and into which flowed a purer air.

On certain days, I was agitated by the desire to see my grandmother again or by the fear that she might be ill, or else by the memory of some business left half-finished in Paris, which seemed to have made no progress, or sometimes, again, by some difficulty in which, even here, I had managed to become involved. One or other of these anxieties would have prevented me from sleeping, and I would be powerless to face up to my depression, which in an instant would fill the whole of my existence. Then I would send a messenger from the hotel to the barracks with a note for Saint-Loup, telling him that if it was physically possible—I knew that it was extremely difficult for him—I should be most grateful if he would look in for a minute. An hour later he would arrive; and on hearing his ring at the door I felt myself liberated from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were stronger than I, he was stronger than they, and my attention was diverted from them and turned towards him, who would know how to settle them. On entering the room he would at once envelop me in the fresh air in which from early morning he had been active and busy, a vital atmosphere very different from that of my room, to which I at once adapted myself by appropriate reactions.

“I hope you weren’t angry with me for bothering you. There is something that’s worrying me, as you probably guessed.”

“Not at all. I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I thought it very nice of you. I was delighted that you sent for me. But what’s the trouble? Things not going well? What can I do to help?”

He would listen to my explanations, and give precise answers; but before he uttered a word he would have transformed me to his own likeness; compared with the important occupations which kept him so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries which a moment ago I had been unable to endure for another instant seemed to me as negligible as they did to him. I was like a man who, having been unable to open his eyes for some days, sends for a doctor, who neatly and gently raises his eyelid, removes from beneath it a grain of sand, and shows it to him; the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my cares resolved themselves in a telegram which Saint-Loup undertook to dispatch. Life