oice,
your charitable eyes, and your lifeless gestures; you are dead; it is
twenty years since you have had a will of your own, a desirous look, a
single manifestation of impatience, a stray impulse, an hour, anything
you can call your own; it is twenty years since you renounced. But your
husband never goes out, he has his wife and children, he earns your
living, a comfortable living; everyone respects him, and "one cannot
have everything."

As for you, you can live contentedly with a twenty-year-old unhappiness
upon your shoulders; you breathe, you go about; the women around you
have the same fate, and this sustains you. But we, mother, who are
different, the daughters of my generation, we who have sensual hearts,
reasoning minds, new energies--_I_, who have done nothing, I cannot, I
tell you, and if a future is given me, I want to snatch whatever it
holds.

The music has stopped; I cannot hear them any more.... It is as if my
heart were beginning to live.

The tangible darkness of the room deepens little by little. Its peace,
its solitude. I can distinguish the walls, or rather the vaporous
shadows of walls, the windows where the cold light of the garden is
paling, the indistinct rectangle which stretches along the ceiling ...
and in that silence in which God is rooted is the hunted soul returning
to its place.

Ah, shattered again! The music sets the hubbub going....

Besides, certain words are too beautiful, and you say them to intoxicate
yourself, but when they are gone, you realize, your arms are empty.

I asked myself: "What is youth?" This is what youth is: that terrible
thing, that sin, that torture which one must stifle: it is my pure
intoxication defiled by their impure intoxication. I wanted to sing my
youth, give it out, exhale it. Jeering life is below, with its people,
its fouling habits, its sneers and titters. They were quite right; you
can't escape it. You must adapt yourself to it; it is the law. I will
adapt myself; I will have a husband; he will be kind, faithful; there
will be no one beside him; he will be all in all to me; he will skirt
the shores of my being; he will pronounce judgment on all my actions, my
comings and goings, my looks; his word will be final. I shall lie in his
bed every night; he will see my timid body, my naked sleep, my sleeping
life; he will stand upright in my life as in a garden which one is not
afraid to ravage, and when truth will pass by us, he will sit still and