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203 STRAIT IS THE GATE

journal did not begin again till the following year; the pages were not dated, but had certainly been written at the time of my stay at Fongueusemar.


Sometimes as I listen to him talking, I seem to be watching myself think. He explains me and discovers me to myself. Should I exist without him? I am only when I am with him . . . Sometimes I hesitate as to whether what I feel for him is really what people call love the picture that is generally drawn of love is so different from that which I should like to draw. I should like nothing to be said about it, and to love him without knowing that I love him. I should like, above all, to love him without his knowing it. I no longer get any joy out of that part of life that has to be lived without him. My virtue is all only to please him — and yet, when I am with him, I feel my virtue weakening.


I used to like learning the piano, because it seemed to me that I was able to make some progress in it every day. That too, perhaps, is the secret of the pleasure I take in reading a book in a foreign language; not, indeed, that I prefer any other language whatever to our own, or that the writers I admire in it appear to me in any way

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