Speaking quietly, he said, “I want those ten days with her.” The words held a scarcely concealed threat—if you deprive me of them I will make our stay in the mountains hell. The idea that I was going to give in to this blackmail made me feel sick. No more concessions! It gets me nowhere, and it disgusts me with myself. One has to look things in the face. This is not a mere affair. He is cutting his life into two, and I don’t have the larger part. I’ve had enough. Presently I shall say to him, “Her or me.”

“Yes, now. This business is dragging on too much. I have borne it too long by far.” I looked at him challengingly. “Come now, which do you like best? Her or me?”

“You, of course,” he said in a toneless voice. And he added, “But I like Noëllie too.”

I saw red. “Admit the truth, then! She’s the one you like best! All right! Go to her! Get out of here. Get out at once. Take your things and go.”

I pulled his suitcase out of the wardrobe, I flung clothes into it higgledy-piggledy, I unhooked coat hangers. He took my arm: “Stop!” I went on. I wanted him to go; I really wanted it—it was sincere. Sincere because I did not believe in it. It was like a dreadful psychodrama in which they play at truth. It is the truth, but it is being acted. I shouted, “Go and join that bitch, that schemer, that dirty little shady lawyer.”

So for eight years now he has not loved me and he has been going to bed with other women—with the little Pelleria, for two years, with a South American patient that I know nothing about at all; with a nurse at the hospital; and lastly for eighteen months past with Noëllie. I screamed: I was on the edge of hysteria. Then he gave me a tranquilizer and his voice altered. “Listen, I don’t really mean all I have just said. Only you are so unfair you make me unfair too.”

I am in a dilemma. If Maurice is a swine, then I have wrecked my life, loving him. But perhaps he had reasons for not being able to bear me any more. In that case I must look upon myself as hateful and contemptible, without even knowing why. Both suppositions are appalling.

Isabelle thinks—or at least that’s what she says—that Maurice did not mean a quarter of what he said. He has had affairs without telling me—that is perfectly usual. She had always told me a faithfulness lasting twenty years is an impossibility for a man. Clearly Maurice would have done better to tell me, but he felt completely bound by his promises. As for his grievances against me, he has no doubt just made them up: if he had married me unwillingly I should have sensed it—we should not have been so happy. She advises me to wipe the slate clean. She still thinks I have the winning position. Men choose the easiest solution—it is easier to stay with one’s wife than to plunge into a new life. She made me telephone an old friend of hers for an appointment. This friend is a gynecologist; she has great experience of marital problems, and Isabelle thinks she may be able to help me to understand my difficulties. Very well.

Jealous of his work: I must admit that that is not untrue. For ten years on end, through Maurice, I carried out an experiment that fascinated me—following the relationship of the doctor with the patient. I took part in it: I advised him. He saw fit to break this bond between us—such an important one for me. After that I confess that I was hardly very zealous about watching his progress passively and from afar. His progress left me cold: that was true. It is the human being I admire in him, not the scientist. But “castrating woman”—that is unfair. I only refused to feign enthusiasm I did not feel: he used to love my sincerity. I can’t bring myself to believe that it wounded his vanity. There is no small-mindedness in Maurice. Or is there, and has Noëllie found out the best way of exploiting it? Revolting idea. My head is filled with confusion. I thought I knew what kind of person I was: what kind of person he was. And all at once I no longer recognize us, neither him nor me.

When this happens to other people it seems to be a limited, bounded event, easy to ring around and to overcome. And then you find yourself absolutely alone, in a hallucinating experience that your imagination had not even begun to approach.

I am afraid of not sleeping and I am afraid of sleeping, on the nights that Maurice spends with Noëllie. That empty bed next to mine, these flat, cold sheets.… I take sleeping pills, but in vain; for I dream. Often in my dreams I faint with distress. I lie there under Maurice’s gaze, paralyzed, with the whole world’s anguish on my face. I expect him to rush toward me. He glances indifferently in my direction and walks off. I woke up and it was still night—I could feel the weight of the darkness; I was in a corridor; I hurried down it, and it grew narrower and narrower; I could scarcely breathe. Presently I should have to crawl and I should stay wedged there until I died. I screamed. And I began calling him more quietly, weeping as I did so. Every night I call him: not him—the other one, the one who loved me. And I wonder whether I should not prefer it if he were dead. I used to tell myself that death was the only irremediable misfortune and that if he were to leave me I should get over it. Death was dreadful because it was possible; a break was bearable because I could not imagine it. But now in fact I tell myself that if he were dead I should at least know whom I had lost and who I was myself. I no longer know anything. The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself—is swallowed up behind you as you flee. There is no going back. The house has vanished, and the village and the whole of the valley. Even if you survive there is nothing left, not even what had been your living space on earth.

Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me. (And I have been astonished at this blindness, in other women. Strange that one can only understand one’s own case by the help of other people’s experience—experience that is not the same as mine, and that doesn’t help.)

Stupid things fleeting through one’s head. A film I saw when I was a child. A wife going to see her husband’s mistress. “For you it’s only fun. But I love him!” And the mistress is moved, and she sends the wife to take her place at the nocturnal rendezvous. In the darkness the husband takes her for the other one, and in the morning he comes back to her, looking shamefaced. It was an old silent film that the studio put on for laughs, but that stirred me a great deal. I can still see the wife’s long dress, and her bandeaux.

Talk to Noëllie? But it’s not just fun for her: it’s a major undertaking. She would tell me that she loved him too; and certainly she’s very fond of all that he can give a woman nowadays. For my part I loved him when he was twenty-three—an uncertain future—difficulties. I loved him with no security; and I gave up the idea of a career for myself. Anyhow I regret nothing.

I am torturing myself. What is the general opinion of me? Quite objectively, who am I? Am I less intelligent than I suppose? As for that, it is the kind of question it is no use asking anybody: no one would like to reply that I was a fool. And how can one tell? Everybody thinks he is intelligent, even the people I find stupid. That is why a woman is always more affected by compliments about her looks than by those about her mind—for she has inner certainties about her mind, those which everybody has and which therefore prove nothing. To know your limits you have to be able to go beyond them: in other words, you have to be able to jump right over your own shadow. I always understand what I hear and what I read: but perhaps I grasp it all too quickly, for want of being able to understand the full wealth and complexity of an idea. Is it my shortcomings that prevent me from seeing Noëllie’s superiority?