By what right does carnal love say, “I am your hearts and minds as well, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes of glory and defeat; I am Love!”?  It is not true, it is not true.  Only by violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets and lovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not.  The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar.  Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, “It’s grand to be mad!” No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.

By the curtain in the angle of the wall, upright and motionless I am speaking in a low voice, but it seems to me that I am shouting and struggling.

When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are no more lies.

After a silence, Marie lifts to me the face of a shipwrecked woman with lifeless eyes, and asks me: 

“But if this love is an illusion, what is there left?”

I come near and look at her, to answer her.  Against the window’s still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face.  Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do.  Is it habit?  No, not only that.  Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps between us two also.  But there is more.  There is not only the narrowness of rooms to bring us together.  There is more, there is more!  So I say to her: 

“There’s you.”

“Me?” she says.  “I’m nothing.”

“Yes, you are everything, you’re everything to me.”

She has stood up, stammering.  She puts her arms around my neck, but falls fainting, clinging to me, and I carry her like a child to the old armchair at the end of the room.

All my strength has come back to me.  I am no longer wounded or ill.  I carry her in my arms.  It is difficult work to carry in your arms a being equal to yourself.  Strong as you may be, you hardly suffice for it.  And what I say as I look at her and see her, I say because I am strong and not because I am weak: 

“You’re everything for me because you are you, and I love all of you.”

And we think together, as if she were listening to me: 

You are a living creature, you are a human being, you are the infinity that man is, and all that you are unites me to you.  Your suffering of just now, your regret for the ruins of youth and the ghosts of caresses, all of it unites me to you, for I feel them, I share them.  Such as you are and such as I am.  I can say to you at last, “I love you.”

I love you, you who now appearing truly to me, you who truly duplicate my life.  We have nothing to turn aside from us to be together.  All your thoughts, all your likes, your ideas and your preferences have a place which I feel within me, and I see that they are right even if my own are not like them (for each one’s freedom is part of his value), and I have a feeling that I am telling you a lie whenever I do not speak to you.