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“She’s a disgrace. She has no shame. There she is now, parading her kid right under the noses of decent folk. What a pity you were not able to attend mass Sunday! Father Paul’s sermon was clearly directed at her …”

If the things happening in this town haven’t changed this old woman, well then we are truly lost.

In any case, I can’t imagine Jane prattling about Mme Audier, watching her every move. She must not even remember that she exists: you attack your neighbor to mask your own envy, but what could Jane envy her for?

Just to shock her, I want to praise Violette, the prostitute, but I dare not. Confident I share her opinions, she calls on me as her witness. The strength of habit! I am unable to loosen my tongue and speak my mind.

Tonight, I hold a mannequin in my arms the size of Jean Luze. A mannequin so perfect it would appease Messalina’s ardor.16 I close my eyes, offering my naked body. My imagination rages! The hand stroking mine is his. I am taut as a bow. Gasping for air, I whisper his name. My head roils on the pillow. I am no longer seeing him but another. Who is it? I don’t dare comprehend. Despite my efforts, a feeling of frustration lingers. I come with lassitude, with regret and remorse, as if my body disapproved of this duality.

Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can’t reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn’t I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can’t define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever.

Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. I have even broken with Annette. Her mediocre taste repels me. I aspire to find some kind of happiness beyond myself. Now I want our fates to be independent of each other. I don’t like this boy who paws her in the evening on the veranda, this Paul Trudor who’s been after her since the ball.

“She’s about to make a bad match,” Félicia confessed to me warily. “Try and speak to her.”

And why should I be against it, personally? He’s the man she needs. He’ll whittle away until her fire dies down. I hear Annette laughing. Her old waterfall of laughter. It’s over, Jean Luze will never be able to turn her head again. She brushes right past him, undulating in her tight skirt, and blows a mouthful of smoke in his face.

“You know,” she says to him, “I can’t make up my mind about your son; he’s so small that I can’t tell whether he’s handsome or ugly.”

Jean Luze laughs. He shakes Paul Trudor’s hand and watches them as they leave, entwined around each