'I get the impression that she's living on two different planes at once,' I said. 'She's perfectly lucid, and at the same time she tells herself that you're madly in love with her and that she could have been the greatest singer of the century. I think that her lucidity will win in the end. But what's going to become of her then?'

'Ah! That I don't know!' Henri replied. 'I don't want to be a bastard, but I'm not made to be a martyr, either. Sometimes the situation seems simple to me: when you're not in love any more, you're just not in love any more. But at other times, it seems unfair to have stopped loving her; after all, she's the same Paula.'