Every letter said, “In a little while, how we shall love each other when our time is spent together!  How beautiful you will be when you are always there.  Later on we’ll make that trip again; after a while we’ll carry that scheme out, later on . . .”

“That’s all we could say!”

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time so far from each other, and that we were unhappy.

“Ah!” said Marie, in a sort of terror, “we wrote that!  And afterwards . . .”

After, the letter from which we expected all, said: 

“Soon we shan’t leave each other any more.  At last we shall live!” And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . .

“And afterwards?”

“After that, there’s nothing more . . . it’s the last letter.”

* * * * * *

There is nothing more.  It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealing the truth.  There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost.  There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got.  We hope, and then we regret.  We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past!  The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing.  To ask, to ask, to have not!  Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty.  Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are.  Happiness, that thing which never is—­and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon the chair.

I take her hand, as I did before.  I speak to her, rather timidly and at random:  “Carnal love isn’t the whole of love.”

“It’s love!” Marie answers.

I do not reply.

“Ah!” she says, “we try to juggle with words, but we can’t conceal the truth.”

“The truth!  I’m going to tell you what I have been truly, I. . . .”

* * * * * *

I could not prevent myself from saying it, from crying it in a loud and trembling voice, leaning over her.  For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth.  It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me.

And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness.  I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.

Never has a confession so complete been thrown off.  Yes, among the fates which men and women bear together, one must be almost mad not to lie.  I tick off my past, the succession of love-affairs multiplied by each other, and come to naught.  I have been an ordinary man, no better, no worse, than another; well, here I am, here is the man, here is the lover.