_No_, you do not elevate aberration into an
ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.

By the curtain in the angle of the wall, upright and motionless I am
speaking in a low voice, but it seems to me that I am shouting and
struggling.

When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are no
more lies.

After a silence, Marie lifts to me the face of a shipwrecked woman with
lifeless eyes, and asks me:

"But if this love is an illusion, what is there left?"

I come near and look at her, to answer her. Against the window's still
pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her
night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she
bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman,
that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire
no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not
only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps
between us two also. But there is more. There is not only the
narrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there is
more! So I say to her:

"There's you."

"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing."

"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me."

She has stood up, stammering. She puts her arms around my neck, but
falls fainting, clinging to me, and I carry her like a child to the old
armchair at the end of the room.

All my strength has come back to me. I am no longer wounded or ill. I
carry her in my arms. It is difficult work to carry in your arms a
being equal to yourself. Strong as you may be, you hardly suffice for
it. And what I say as I look at her and see her, I say because I am
strong and not because I am weak:

"You're everything for me because you are you, and I love _all_ of
you."

And we think together, as if she were listening to me:

You are a living creature, you are a human being, you are the infinity
that man is, and all that you are unites me to you. Your suffering of
just now, your regret for the ruins of youth and the ghosts of
caresses, all of it unites me to you, for I feel them, I share them.
Such as you are and such as I am. I can say to you at last, "I love
you."

I love you, you who now appearing truly to me, you who truly duplicate
my life. We have nothing to turn aside from us to be together. All
your thoughts, all your likes, your ideas and your preferences have a
place which I fe