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temerity, when it was actually her who enticed me to her mouth as I came closer to her face. Her hands clung fiercely round my neck; they couldn’t have held me more tightly in a shipwreck. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to save her, or to drown alongside her.
    Once she was sitting up again, she held my head in her lap, stroking my hair and saying to me over and over softly: “You must go, you must never come back.” I daren’tcall her
‘tu’
as she did me, and when I was unable to stay silent any longer, I struggled to find the right words, framing my sentences so as not to speak to her directly, because if I couldn’t call her
‘tu’
, I was conscious how much more impossible it was to call her
‘vous’
. My tears scalded me. If one of them fell onto Marthe’s hand, I expected to hear her cry out. I blamed myself for breaking the spell, thinking I had been mad to put my lips to hers, forgetting that it was her who had kissed me. “You must go, don’t ever come back.” I shed tears of rage, tears of grief. In the same way, the anger of the wolf caught in the trap hurts him as much as the snare itself. Had I said anything, it would have been to insult Marthe. My silence worried her; in it she saw resignation. In my unfairness, which might have actually been clear-sightedness, I was causing her to think: “After all, since it’s too late now, I’m just as happy for him to suffer.” The heat of this fire made me shiver, my teeth chattered. To the real grief that dragged me out of childhood were added childish emotions. I was the onlooker who doesn’t want to leave because he doesn’t like the outcome. I told her: “I won’t go. You’ve been making fun of me. I don’t want to see you any more.”
    Because if I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to see Marthe again either. I would have sooner turned her out of her own house!
    “You’re just a child,” she sobbed. “You don’t understand that if I’m asking you to go it’s because I love you.”
    Hatefully I said that I was perfectly aware that she had obligations, that her husband was away at the War.
    She shook her head: “I was happy before I met you, I thought I loved my fiancé. I forgave him for not really understanding me. But you’ve proved to me that I didn’tlove him. My obligation isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t to not lie to my husband, it’s to not lie to you. Go now and don’t think ill of me; you’ll soon forget me. I don’t want to make your life miserable. I’m crying because I’m too old for you!”
    These loving words of hers were a superb piece of childishness. And whatever passions I may have experienced later, there could never be a sweeter feeling than that of seeing a girl of nineteen in tears because she thinks she is too old.
    The flavour of that first kiss disappointed me, like fruit you taste for the first time. It’s not in new things that we experience the greatest pleasure, but in habit. Within moments, not only had I become accustomed to Marthe’s lips, I was unable to live without them. And it was then that she spoke of depriving me of them for ever.
    That evening, Marthe saw me all the way home. To feel closer, I huddled up against her surreptitiously, put my arm round her waist. She didn’t repeat what she had said, that we ought not to see each other again; on the contrary, she was sad to think that we would have to part at any moment. She made me swear a million wild extravagances.
    When we got to my house, I didn’t want her to go back on her own, so I took her home. This childishness might have gone on for ever, because she then wanted to walk back with me again. I agreed, on condition that she only come half-way.
    I arrived half-an-hour late for dinner. It was the first time. I blamed it on the train. My father pretended to believe me.
    Nothing weighed on me now. I walked along the street with the same light tread as in my dreams.
    Up till then I had always had to resign