At the same time I persisted in my determination to be of service to humanity. I attacked Renan in my diary. I protested that a great man is not an end in himself: he will only justify his existence if he contributes to the raising of the moral and intellectual standards of common humanity. My Catholic upbringing had taught me never to look upon any individual, however lowly, as of no account: everyone had the right to bring to fulfilment what I called their eternal essence. My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich, and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.

I felt I should already be trying to communicate the experience of solitude which I was then undergoing. In April I wrote the first pages of a novel. In the character of Éliane, I described myself wandering in a park with some of my cousins; I picked up a beetle out of the grass. ‘Let’s see!’ they cried. They thronged round me, but I struggled out of their grasp and ran away with the beetle jealously guarded in my hand. They ran after me; breathless, with pounding heart, I ran deeper and deeper into the woods until I shook them off; then I began to cry softly. Soon I dried my tears, and murmured to myself: ‘No one will ever know.’ I walked slowly back home. ‘She felt sufficiently strong in herself to defend her one possession against blows and blandishments, and to keep her fist tightly closed all the time.’

This little fable expressed my most obsessive worry: how to defend myself against other people [...]