I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence—­but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.

“Ah!” she cries, “if we came to life again!”

But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion.  I see by the track of her tears, and because I am looking at her—­that she has powdered her face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as she did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me.  This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passing time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and exquisite did—­make enduring, and save!  But this time, a few tears have washed away the fragile, mortal effort.

She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something in them which would transform her.  She asserts, as she did the other morning, “There must be illusion.  No, we must not see things as they are.”  But I see clearly that such words do not exist.

Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured, “You—­you’ve no more illusion at all.  I pity you!”

At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me only, and she pities me!  She has found something in her grief to give me.

She is silent.  She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she stammers—­“The truth.”

The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many others.  The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal than we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important.  Therefore we survive very much longer than we live.  There are things we think we know and which yet are secrets.  Do we really know what we believe?  We believe in miracles.  We make great efforts to struggle, to go mad.  We should like to let all our good deserts be seen.  We fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going to come along.  But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us.  The impossible becomes again the impossible.  We are as silent as silence itself.

We stayed lonely on the seat until evening.  Our hands and faces shone like gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist.

We go back home.  We wait and then have dinner.  We live these few hours.  And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do!  It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose.  We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle.  But all of it is empty.  We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy.  It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by—­so close—­are phantoms!