It's been going on like this for two weeks now, since the moment I arrived in Paris. Robert was waiting for me at the Gare des Invalides. He didn't see me right away. He was pacing the sidewalk with the little steps of an old man, and suddenly I thought, 'He's old!' He smiled at me; his eyes were as young as ever, but his face was beginning to crumble; it will go on crumbling until the day it decomposes. Since then, I haven't stopped thinking: 'He's good for ten or fifteen years, twenty years, perhaps. Twenty years is so little time! And then he'll die. He'll die before me.' There are nights when I awaken with a start and say to myself, 'He'll die before me.' He was talking with Henri this morning, they were saying they would have to start all over again, that one always started all over again, that one can't do otherwise; they were making plans, they were arguing. And I was looking at his teeth; it's the only constant thing in a body - the teeth, where the skeleton bares itself. I was looking at Robert's skeleton and I was saying to myself, 'He's waiting for his hour? The hour would come. We're allowed to linger a while, some more, some less, but none of us are ever spared. I shall see Robert stretched out on a bed, his skin waxen, a false smile on his lips; I'll be alone before his body. What lies, those peaceful monuments of stone sleeping side by side in their crypts, and those couples entwined on their funeral urns! They can mix our ashes together as much as they want to, but they won't unite our deaths. For twenty years, I believed we were living together; but no, each of us is alone, imprisoned in his body, with his arteries hardening under his withering skin, with his liver, his kidneys, wearing out and his blood turning pale, with his death which ripens noiselessly inside him and which separates him from everyone else.