I chose going to pieces: I no longer know when it is day and when it is night: when things are too bad, when it becomes unbearable, I gulp down spirits, tranquilizers or sleeping pills. When things are a little better I take stimulants and plunge into a detective story—I have laid in a stock. When the silence stifles me I turn on the radio and from a remote planet there come voices that I can hardly understand: that world has a time, set hours, laws, speech, anxieties and amusements that are essentially foreign to me. How far one can let oneself go, when one is entirely alone and shut in! The bedroom stinks of stale tobacco and spirits; there is ash everywhere; I am filthy; the sheets are filthy; the sky is filthy behind the filthy windows: this filth is a shell that protects me; I shall never leave it again. It would be easy to slide just a little further into the void, as far as the point of no return. I have all that is needed in my drawer. But I won’t, I won’t! I’m forty-four; it’s too early to die—it’s unfair! I can’t live any longer. I don’t want to die.

[...] There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial. For example, the reason why I began to keep it, at Les Salines, was not that I had suddenly recovered my youth, nor that I wanted to fill my loneliness with people, but because I had to exorcise a certain anxiety that would not admit its own existence. It was hidden deep under the silence and the warmth of that disturbing afternoon, bound up with Maurice’s gloom and with his departure. Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost. There are some remarks that make me blush for shame.… I have always wanted the truth; and the reason why I have had it is that I desired it. Is it possible to be so mistaken about one’s life as all that? Is everybody as blind as this or am I an outstanding prize half-wit? And not only a half-wit. I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself! I said that Noëllie did not amount to anything and that Maurice preferred me; and I knew perfectly well that was untrue. I have taken to my pen again not to go back over the same ground but because the emptiness within me, around me, is so vast that this movement of my hand is necessary to tell myself that I am still alive.

Why? I batter my head against the walls of this blind alley. I have not loved a scoundrel all through these twenty years! I am not, unknown to myself, a fool or a shrew! This love between us was real: it was solid—as indestructible as truth. Only there was time going by and I—I did not know it. The river of time, the erosion caused by the river’s current: there you have it—there has been an erosion of his love by the flow of time. But why not of mine, too, in that case?

I did reread them, and the feeling of uneasiness is still with me. The early letters are in tune with Maurice’s, eager, loving and happy. Later they give an odd sort of a ring, vaguely whining, almost querulous. I assert with altogether too much rapture that we love one another as we did the first day; I insist upon his assuring me of this; I ask questions that call for given replies—how can I have been satisfied by them, knowing I had wrenched them out of him? But I did not realize: I forgot. I have forgotten a great deal. What was that letter he sent me and I tell him I burned after our talk on the telephone? I only remember it vaguely: I was at Mougins with the children; he was finishing his preparation for an examination; I reproached him for not writing often enough; he answered roughly. Very roughly. Distraught, I sprang to the telephone; he said he was sorry; he begged me to burn his letter. Are there other occurrences that I have buried? I always imagined myself to be honest. It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

[...] to my utter astonishment it was in his eyes that I saw tears.

“I have been behaving like a swine!”

I said, “It’s not being a swine to love another woman. You can’t help it.”

Shrugging his shoulders he said, “Do I really love her?”

I have been feeding on that remark for the last two days. They spent a fortnight together, in the freedom and the beauty of the mountains, and he comes back saying, “Do I really love her?” It is a line I should never have dared play deliberately; but my desperation has worked on my side. This long tête-à-tête has begun to wear out his passion. Again he said, “I didn’t want this! I didn’t want to make you unhappy.” As for that, it is a stock phrase which hardly moves me at all. If he had felt only an upsurge of pity I should not have taken hope again. But there in front of me, speaking aloud, he said, “Do I really love her?” And I tell myself that perhaps this is the beginning of the decrystallization that will detach him from Noëllie and give him back to me.

“But you didn’t want to admit that Maurice was a swine, either,” I said.

She protested. “No. Maurice is not a swine! He’s a man caught between two women: no one is a very shining light in cases of that kind.”

“He never ought to have got himself into that position.”

“It happens to very decent creatures.”

She is indulgent with Maurice because she has put up with a great deal from Charles. But their relationship was a completely different story.

“I don’t believe Maurice is a decent creature anymore,” I said. “I am discovering small-minded aspects in him. I wounded his vanity by not going into ecstasies over his successes.”

“There you are unjust,” she said, with a kind of sternness. “If a man likes to talk about his work, that is not vanity. It has always surprised me that you care so little for what Maurice does.”

“I’ve nothing of any interest to say to him about it.”

“No. But he would certainly have liked to tell you about his difficulties, and the things he had discovered.”

[...] She grew very angry. “I can’t bear seeing you tearing yourself to pieces in this way. With Papa treating you like this, you ought to send him packing. Let him go and live with that woman: you will be much quieter in your mind.”

She would not have given me that advice only a month ago.

The fact is that if I were a good loser I should tell Maurice to go. But my last chance is that Noëllie, for her part, should grow exasperated, make scenes and show herself in an unpleasant light. And also that the way I stick it out should touch Maurice. And then even if he is not often here, this is, after all, still his home. I am not living in a desert. Weakness; cowardice: but there is no reason why I should torture myself—I am trying to survive.

“You’ll get ill. Or go off your head. As for me, I can’t help you because I’m part of it. But I beg you, do see a psychiatrist.”

I said no. He pressed me and pressed me. In the end he grew impatient. “How do you expect to get out of it? You do nothing to help.”

“Get out of what?”

“Out of this depression. Anyone would say you were sinking deeper into it on purpose.”

He shut himself up in his study. He thinks I am trying to blackmail him with misery, so as to frighten him and prevent him from leaving me. Maybe he’s right. Do I know what I am? Perhaps a kind of leech that feeds on the life of others—on Maurice’s, on our daughters’, on the life of all those lame ducks I claimed to be helping. An egoist who will not let go: I drink, I let myself slide, I make myself ill with the unadmitted intention of softening his heart. Completely phony through and through, rotten to the bone, playacting, exploiting his pity. I ought to tell him to go and live with Noëllie, to be happy without me. I can’t bring myself to do so.

He urged me to take up this diary again. I see the gimmick perfectly well—he is trying to give me back an interest in myself, to reconstruct my identity for me. But the only thing that counts is Maurice. My self, what does that amount to? I have never paid much attention to it. I was safe, because he loved me. If he does not love me anymore.… It is only the transition that haunts my mind—how have I deserved it that he should no longer love me? Or have I not deserved it, and is he a swine—a swine that should be punished, and his accomplice with him? Dr. Marquet sets about it at the other end—my father, my mother, my father’s death: he wants to make me talk about myself, and I only want to talk to him about Maurice and Noëllie. Still, I did ask him whether he thought me intelligent. Yes, undoubtedly; but intelligence is not a quality with an independent existence: when I go on and on pursuing my obsessions, my intelligence is no longer available to me.

“You just won’t talk to me about myself: do you think so very badly of me then?”

“What a notion!”

“I know I am being a bore. But I do want to see clearly into my past.”

“It’s the future that counts. Find yourself some men. Or take a job.”

“No. I need your father.”

“Maybe he’ll come back to you.”

“You know perfectly well he won’t.”

We have had this conversation ten times over. I bore her too; I exasperate her. Perhaps if I were to push her far enough she would end up by breaking out and telling me. But she has such patience that I lose heart. Who knows but they may have written to her to tell her about my case and beg her to bear with me?