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240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
You must have been surprised when I left so suddenly. I apologize for that but do not regret it… Our friendship has gone beyond the point of overly flattering confidences. Men surrender their souls, as women do their bodies, in successive and carefully defended stages. One after the other, I have thrown my most secret troops into battle. My true memories, corralled in their enclave, will soon give themselves up and come out into the open.
I now struggle to grasp how I could have harbored two such contradictory personalities. They lived on different planes and never met. The tender lover who hankered for devotion had realized that his beloved did not exist in real life.
I may not have known women more beautiful than Odile, but I knew plenty who were more brilliant, more perfectly intelligent, yet not one of them managed to bring the physical world within my grasp as she did. Having been distanced from it by too much reading, too much solitary meditation, I now discovered trees and flowers and the smell of the earth, all sorts of things picked by Odile every morning and laid in bunches at my feet.
For my own sake, I would like to make a record of my love as you did of yours. Philippe, do you think I will succeed – however ineptly – in writing our story? I shall have to do it as you did, fairly, being very careful to say everything.