He went upstairs and sat down at his desk. She really deserved being shown the manuscript. That way he would be rid of her for good. Of course, he'd have to cut the manuscript a bit before publication — unless she should die before then. But in the meantime, when he reread it, he felt revenged. 'In a way, literature is truer than life,' he said to himself. 'Dubreuilh played me for a sucker, Louis is a skunk, Paula poisons my life — and I go on smiling at them: On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel.' Once more, he read through the description of the break up. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. 'Yes, it's false,' he said to himself, 'but it's damned satisfying. In life you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. Paula exasperates me, and yet in a little while I'll take pity on her and she'll think that basically I still have some love for her. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.' He unscrewed the top of his pen. Paula would never read those pages, and yet he exulted in them as if he had forced her to recognize herself in the portrait he had drawn of her; a woman acting the part of a lover and loving only her histrionics and her dreams; pretending to be noble, generous, self-sacrificing, when in fact she is without pride and without courage, steeped in the egoism of her feigned passions. That was how he saw her, and on paper she matched that picture exactly.