Paula came down the stairs with soft, silken steps. 'You uncorked all the bottles!' she exclaimed. 'That was sweet of you.'

'You're so positively dedicated to violet!' he said, smiling.

'But you adore violet!' she said.

He had been adoring violet for the past ten years; ten years was a long time.

'You don't like this dress?' Paula asked.

'Yes, of course,' he said hastily. 'It's very pretty. I just thought that there were some other colours which might become you. Green, for example,' he ventured, picking the first colour that came to mind.

She looked at herself in one of the mirrors. 'Green?' she said, and there was bewilderment in her voice. 'You really think I'd look well in green?'

It was all so useless, he told himself. In green or yellow he would never again see in her the woman who, that day ten years earlier, he had desired so much when she had nonchalantly held out her long violet gloves to him.

Henri looked at him cheerfully. Eighteen or eighty, Dubreuilh, with his huge, laughing eyes that consumed everything in sight, would always look just as young. What a zealot! By comparison, Henri was often tempted to think of himself as dissipated, lazy, weak. But it was useless to drive himself. At twenty, he had had so great an admiration for Dubreuilh that he felt himself compelled to ape him. The result was that he was constantly sleepy, loaded himself with medicines, sank almost into a stupor. Now he had to make up his mind once and for all. With no time for himself he had lost his taste for life and the desire to write. He had become a machine. For four years he had been a machine, and now he was determined above all else to become a man again.

She walked towards the bathroom. It was impossible not to weaken from time to time and speak a few kind words to her, smile gently at her. She stored those treasured relics in her heart and extracted miracles from them whenever she felt her faith wavering. 'But in spite of everything, she knows I don't love her any more,' he said to himself for reassurance. He undressed and put on his pyjamas. She knew it, yes. But as long as she didn't admit it to herself it meant nothing. He heard a rustle of silk, then the sound of running water and the clinking of glass, those sounds which once used to make his heart pound. 'No, not tonight, not tonight,' he said to himself uneasily. Paula appeared in the doorway, grave and nude, her hair tumbling over her shoulders. She was nearly as perfect as ever, but for Henri all her splendid beauty no longer meant anything. She slipped in between the sheets and without uttering a word, pressed her body to his. Paula withdrew her lips slightly, and, embarrassed, he heard her murmuring old endearments he never spoke to her now.

She uttered a long moan of satisfaction. He embraced her violently, smothered her mouth with his lips, and to get it over with as quickly as possible immediately penetrated her. Inside it was red, a deep dark red as in the too-red living room. She began to groan and to utter words and phrases the way she used to. But in those days, Henri's love shielded her; her cries, groans, laughs, bites were sacred offerings. Tonight he was lying atop a frenzied woman who spoke obscene words and whose scratches hurt. He was horrified by her and by himself. Her head bent back, her eyes half-closed, her teeth bared, she had given herself so totally to love, was so frightfully lost, that he felt like slapping her to bring her back to earth, felt like saying, "It's just you and I and we're making love, that's all." It seemed to him as if he were raping a dead woman, or a lunatic, and yet he could not keep himself from enjoying it.

When finally he fell limp on Paula, he heard a triumphant moan.

'Are you happy?' she murmured.

'Of course.'

'I'm so terribly happy!' Paula exclaimed, looking at him through shining tear-brimmed eyes. He hid her unbearably bright face against his shoulder. 'The almond trees will be in bloom ...' he said to himself, closing his eyes. 'And there'll be oranges hanging from the orange trees.'

No question about it, I had too much to drink. After all, it wasn't I who created heaven and earth; no one's asking me to give an accounting of myself. Why must I forever be worrying about others? I'd do better to worry a little about myself for a change. I press my cheek against the pillow; I'm here, it's I. The trouble is there's nothing about me worth giving much thought to. Oh, if someone asks who I am, I can always show him my case history; to become an analyst, I had to be analysed. It was found that I had a rather pronounced Oedipus complex, which explains my marriage to a man twenty years my elder, a clear aggressiveness towards my mother, and some slight homosexual tendencies which conveniently disappeared. To my Catholic upbringing I owe a highly developed superego — the reason for my puritanism and my lack of narcissism. The ambivalent feelings I have in regard to my daughter stem from my aversion to my mother as much as to my indifference concerning myself. My case is one of the most classic types; its segments fall neatly into a predictable pattern. From a Catholic point of view, it's also quite banal: in their eyes I stopped believing in God when I discovered the temptations of the flesh, and my marriage to an unbeliever completed my downfall. Politically and socially, Robert and I were left-wing intellectuals. Nothing in all this is entirely inexact. There I am then, clearly catalogued and willing to be so, adjusted to my husband, to my profession, to life, to death, to the world and all its horrors; me, precisely me, that is to say, no one.

'I'm not attacking your husband,' Scriassine said, with a little smile that reduced my heated words to nothing more than an expression of conjugal loyalty. 'As a matter of fact,' he continued, 'I consider Robert Dubreuilh and Thomas Mann to be the two greatest minds of this age. But that's precisely it; if I predict that he'll give up literature, it's only because I have confidence in his lucidity.'

I shrugged my shoulders. If he was trying to soften me up, he was certainly going about it the wrong way. I detest Thomas Mann.

Scriassine sighed. 'So be it,' he said. 'Let's be optimists. Let's admit that Europe has a chance of remaining independent. But we can't keep her that way except by waging a constant, interminable battle. Working for oneself will be entirely out of the question.'

I did not attempt to answer him. All that Scriassine wanted was to reduce French writers to silence, and I clearly understood why. There was nothing really convincing in his prophecies, and yet his tragic voice awakened an echo in me. 'How shall we live?' The question had been painfully pricking me all evening and for God knows how many days and weeks.

Scriassine looked at me intently. 'One of two things can happen. If men like Dubreuilh and Perron look the situation square in the face, they'll become involved in things that will demand all their time, all their energies. Or if they cheat and obstinately continue to write, their works will be cut off from reality, and deprived of any future; they'll be like the words of blind people, as distressing as Alexandrine poetry.'

It's difficult to engage in a discussion with someone who, while talking of the world and of others, talks constantly of himself. I was unable to speak my mind without hurting him. Nevertheless I said, 'It's useless trying to imprison people in dilemmas; life always causes them to break out.'

'Not in this case. Alexandria or Sparta, there's no other choice. It's far better to admit a thing like that today than to put it off,' he said rather gently. 'Sacrifices are no longer painful when they're behind you.'

'I'm sure Robert won't sacrifice anything.'

'We'll talk about it again a year from now,' Scriassine said. 'A year from now he'll either have, deserted politics or he'll have stopped writing. I don't think he'll desert.'

'Listen,' Robert said in a conciliatory tone of voice, 'one book more or less on earth isn't as important as all that. And the political situation at present is extremely stimulating; I hope you realize that. This is the first time the left has ever held its fate in its own hands, the first chance to try to organize a group independent of the Communists without running the risk of serving the cause of the right. I'm not going to let this opportunity slip by! I've been waiting for it all my life.'

'For my part, I think your books are more important,' I said. 'They bring people something unique and different. But when it comes to politics, you're not the only one about who can become involved in it.'

'But I'm the only one who can steer things in the direction I want them to take,' Robert said cheerfully. 'You of all people ought to understand me. The vigilance committees and the Resistance were useful, all right, but they were negative things. Today, it's a question of building, and that's much more interesting.'

'I understand you very well, but your writing interests me more.'

'Haven't we always agreed that one doesn't write just for the sake of writing?' Robert said. 'At certain times, other forms of action become more urgent.'

'Not for you,' I replied. 'First and foremost, you're a writer.'

'You know that's not true,' Robert said reproachfully. 'For me, the revolution comes first.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but you can best serve the revolution by writing your books.'

Robert shook his head. 'That depends on the circumstances. We're at a critical moment of history just now; first we have to win the political battle.'

I stopped dead in the middle of the street. 'What? Do you believe that too? That people will lose interest in literature?'

'Believe me, they'll have a lot of other things to keep themselves busy with,' Robert said in a voice that again seemed to me too reassuring.

'The prospect doesn't seem to bother you at all,' I said indignantly. 'But a world without literature and art would be horribly sad.'

'In any event, there are millions of men at this very moment to whom literature means absolutely nothing,' Robert replied.

'Yes, but you always expected that to change.'

'I still expect it to. What makes you think I don't?' Robert asked. 'But that's precisely it,' he went on without waiting for me to answer. 'If the world decides to change, there's no doubt we'll go through a period in which literature will be almost completely out of the picture.'

'You don't have to make fun of me,' I said. 'I have a right to ask a few questions from time to time.'

'I ask myself a few, too, you know,' Robert said.

Yes, he does ask himself questions, and graver ones than I do. Personally, I rarely act on my beliefs; that's why I so easily become unhappy. I realize I'm wrong being that way, but with Robert it costs so little to be wrong.

'But you only ask yourself those questions you're able to answer,' I said.

He laughed again. 'Preferably, yes. The others don't serve much purpose.'

'That's no reason not to ask them,' I said. My voice was rising, but I wasn't angry with Robert. I was angry with myself, with my blindness during these past weeks. 'I'd still like to have some idea of what's going to happen to us,' I persisted.

'Don't you think it's rather late?' Robert asked. 'We've both had a lot of punch to drink, and our minds will be a lot clearer tomorrow morning.'

Tomorrow morning the walls will stop spinning, the furniture and books will be in their proper places, always the same places. And my ideas, too, will fall back into place, and I'll begin to live, again from day to day, without turning my head, looking just so far and no farther into the future. I'll stop paying attention to that discordant clatter in my heart. I'm tired of that diet. I looked at the cushion by the fireplace on which Diego used to sit. .'A Nazi victory doesn't enter into my plans,' he had said. And then they had killed him.