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myself to losing the things I had yearned for as a child. Not only that, any toys I was given were spoilt by the obligation to be grateful. But in a child’s eyes, how much prestige there would be in a toy that made a present of itself! I was drunk with desire. Marthe belonged to me, and it wasn’t me who had said it, but her. I could touch her face, kiss her eyes, her arms, dress her, damage her in whatever way I liked. In my frenzy I bit her where her skin was uncovered, so her mother would suspect her of having a lover. I would have liked to carve my initials there. This childish brutality was a reminder of the original meaning of tattoos. Marthe would say: “Yes, bite me, mark me, I want the whole world to know.”
    I would have liked to kiss her breasts. But I daren’t ask, believing that she would offer them by herself, like she had her lips. After a few days, having grown used to her lips, I couldn’t conceive of anything more delightful.

VIII
    WE WERE READING IN THE FIRELIGHT TOGETHER. She often threw on the fire letters that her husband wrote to her from the front every day. You could tell that Marthe’s replies to his anxieties were becoming less and less affectionate and more and more infrequent. I couldn’t see his letters go up in flames without feeling uneasy. They made the fire burn brighter for a moment, and if the truth be known, I was afraid of seeing too clearly.
    Marthe, who now often asked me if it was true that I’d loved her the first time we met, chided me for not having told her before her wedding. She claimed that she wouldn’t have got married; because if she had felt a form of love for Jacques at the beginning of their engagement, then that itself, which had been drawn out for too long because of the War, had gradually emptied her heart of love. She had already stopped loving Jacques by the time she married him. She had hoped that the two weeks’ leave that he had been given might change her feelings.
    But he was inept. The one who loves always annoys the one who doesn’t. And Jacques loved her more and more every day. His letters were those of someone in pain, but who held his Marthe in too high esteem to think her capable of betraying him. So he just blamed himself, beggedher to tell him what he had done to hurt her: “I feel so uncouth when I’m with you, I have the feeling that everything I say upsets you.” Marthe simply replied that he was mistaken, that she didn’t blame him for anything.
    It was now the beginning of March. Spring came early. On days when she didn’t come into Paris with me, Marthe, naked beneath her dressing gown, would wait for me to get back from my art class, lying in front of the fire, where there was always some of her parents-in-law’s olive wood burning. She had asked them to send her some more. I don’t know what kind of shyness it was that held me back, if not the one you experience when confronted with something you haven’t done before. It reminded me of Daphnis. Only in our case it was Chloe who had had a few lessons, but Daphnis didn’t dare ask her to teach him. Although didn’t I regard Marthe as a virgin, who for the first two weeks of her marriage had been delivered up to a stranger to be taken forcibly.
    In bed at night I called out to her, angry with myself—me who considered myself a man—for not being enough of one to make her my mistress. Every day when I went to her house I resolved not to leave until I had done so.
    On my sixteenth birthday in March 1918, begging me not to get cross, she gave me a dressing gown like hers, and which she wanted to see me wear at her house. In my delight I almost made a pun, something I never did. It was my
toga praetextata
—my pretext! Because it seemed that what had been impeding my desires so far was the fear of looking foolish, of feeling dressed while she was not. At first I thought of putting it on that same day. But then I blushed, realising how much of a rebuke this gift of hers