ering on it; I want your ears to
perceive the wonderful, voluptuous charm of sounds, your hands to
rejoice in things soft to the touch; I want you to learn how to breathe
with delight and how to eat with pleasure. Don't smile. None of all this
is childish; it is made up of tiny joyous movements which the simplest
existence can command when it knows how to recognise them. And yet ...
and yet I feel a selfish wish to leave you still in your prison, so that
your desire to escape from it may keep on growing! I love that desire, I
love your actual distress, I love the wretchedness of your past, the
wretchedness of your present, I love you to see difficulties in the way
of your deliverance....

"Oh, if those obstacles could give you, as they do me, that sort of
intoxication for which I cherish them! When at last I see the goal
beyond them, my heart leaps for joy. But hardly is the goal attained
when I rejoice in it only because it brings me to another, higher and
more distant; and my imagination resumes its course, never looking back
except to measure the road already traversed.... In this way, never
satisfied and yet happy in the mere fact that I am advancing and in the
knowledge that no more can be asked of a poor human will, I have the
feeling that my life never stops."

5

"Paris,... 19--

"Dearest, it is evening; it is cold and wet out of doors; but peace and
gaiety shed their radiance in the great drawing-room which you will
soon know, white and bare as a convent-parlour, living and bright as joy
itself. Chance gave me to-day a long day of solitude, like those at
Sainte-Colombe. And yet the hours passed before me and I could not make
them fruitful. When such favours come to me in the midst of excitement,
I am too glad of them to be able to profit by them; I can but feel them;
and they control me without leaving me time to control them in my turn.
I listen to my life, I contemplate it. It has too many opposing voices,
too many absolutely different shapes; my consciousness is lost in it as
a precious stone is swallowed up by the sea. I blush at such chaos. My
soul appears to me only fit to compare with one of those wretched
table-cloths which country dressmakers patch together, at the end of the
year, out of the thousand scraps of the thousand different materials
which they have cut during the season. But is not this the natural
result of the diversity of our feminine souls?

"Antagonistic elements have long bee