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Mademoiselle Malet, and I was surprised and delighted to find that hers looked directly into mine. An infinitely brief glance, but that wasthe minute grain of pollen loaded with unknown forces from which my greatest love blossomed. This look told me without a word that she gave me permission to behave naturally, and as soon as I could I went over to her.
    “What a wonderful garden!” I said.
    “Yes,” she agreed, “and what I love best about Florence is that wherever you are, you can see the mountains and trees. I loathe cities that are simply cities.”
    “Guardi told me the view from behind the house is quite delightful.”
    “Let’s go and see,” she said gaily.
    We found a thick screen of cypress trees and, through the middle of it, a stone staircase leading up to a rocky recess that housed a statue. Farther on to the left there was a terrace with views of the city.
    Mademoiselle Malet leaned on the balustrade close to me for a long time, silently gazing at the pink domes and wide, gently sloping roofs of Florence, and, in the distance, the blue mountains.
    “Oh! I do love this,” she said, enraptured.
    With a very young, very graceful movement, she tipped her head back as if to inhale the scenery.
    From that first conversation, Odile Malet treated me with trusting familiarity. She told me that her father was an architect, that she admired him a great deal, and that he had stayed in Paris. It pained her to see the general as her mother’s escort. After ten minutes we had moved on to truly intimate confidences. I told her about my Amazon and how impossible it was for me to have any appetite for life if I were not sustained by potent and deep-seated feelings. (My cynical tendencies had been instantly swept aside by her presence.) She described how one day, when she was thirteen, her best friend, whom she called Misa, had inquired, “If I asked you to, would you throw yourself off the balcony?” and she had nearly jumped from the fourth floor. That story enchanted me.
    “Have you visited the churches and museums much?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she replied. “But what I like best of all is strolling through the streets … Except I do so hate walking with Maman and her general, so I rise very early in the mornings … Would you like to come with me tomorrow morning? I shall be in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock.”
    “I think I would … Do I need to ask your mother for permission to walk with you?”
    “No,” she said, “leave that to me.”
    The following morning I waited for her at the foot of the stairs and we went out together. The wide flagstones along the embankment gleamed in the sunlight; a bell was ringing somewhere; carriages trotted past. Life suddenly seemed so straightforward; happiness would be always having this blond head beside me, taking this arm when crossing a street and, for a moment, feeling beneath her dress the warmth of her young body. She took me to the Via Tornabuoni; she loved shoe shops, florists, and bookshops. On the Ponte Vecchio, she stood for some time looking at necklaces of large pink and black stones.
    “Aren’t they fun?” she said. “Don’t you think?”
    She had some of the tastes I had once condemned in the poor Denise Aubry.
    What did we talk about? I do not really remember. In my diary, I see:
Walk with O. San Lorenzo. She described the large light above her bed at the convent, coming through a shutter lit from the outside by a streetlamp. As she fell asleep she would watch it grow larger and believed she was in heaven. She toldme about the Bibliothèque rose; * she hates Camille and Madeleine; she herself cannot bear the role of the “good little girl.” Her favorite reading matter is fairy tales and poetry. She sometimes dreams of wandering under the sea with skeleton fish swimming around her, sometimes of a weasel dragging her underground. She likes danger; she rides horses and jumps difficult obstacles on horseback … She does the prettiest