When we got back to Meyrignac, I toyed with the idea of writing; I preferred literature to philosophy, and I wouldn’t have been at all pleased if someone had prophesied that I would become a kind of female Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me. What I dreamed of writing was a ‘novel of the inner life’; I wanted to communicate my experience. I hesitated. I could feel within me ‘masses of things to say’; but I realized that writing is an art and that I was not an expert. All the same I jotted down a few subjects for novels and finally I made a decision. I composed my first work. It was the story of an attempt to escape that came to nothing. The heroine was the same age as myself, eighteen; she was spending her holidays with her family in a country house where she was awaiting the arrival of her fiancé whom she loved in a conventional manner. Until then she had been satisfied with the banality of her existence. Suddenly she discovered that there was ‘something else’. A musician, a genius, awoke in her a realization of the real things in life: art, sincerity, disquiet. She felt that she had been living a lie; a strange, feverish longing took possession of her. The musician went away. The fiancé arrived. From her room on the first floor she could hear the joyous cries of welcome; she hesitated: was she going to keep, or lose for ever, what the musician had given her a glimpse of? Her courage failed her. She went downstairs and smilingly entered the drawing-room where the others were awaiting her. I had no illusions about the value of this tale; but it was the first time I had made myself put my own experience into words, and I took pleasure in writing it.