I was already unhappy, but I didn’t know it. It seemed to me that little Bianca, right after her beautiful birth, had suddenly changed and treacherously taken for herself all my energy, all my strength, all my capacity for imagination. It seemed to me that my husband, too caught up in his fury of accomplishment, didn’t notice that his daughter, now that she was born, had become voracious, demanding, hostile as she had never seemed when she was in my stomach. I gradually discovered that I didn’t have the strength to make the second experience exalting, like the first. My head sank inside the rest of my body, there seemed no prose, verse, rhetorical figure, musical phrase, film sequence, color capable of taming the dark beast I was carrying in my womb. The real breakdown for me was that: the giving up of any sublimation of my pregnancy, the destruction of the happy memory of the first pregnancy, the first birth.