The girl appears astonished and answers, hesitatingly:
"It is five years ago, I don't remember now...."
I was surprised in my turn and looked at her. What! She didn't remember! She had forgotten that! Her lips had not retained the impress of the first kiss!
My eyes closed and from the background of my life a bygone moment rose, one of those memories that linger in the hearts of women with such fidelity and vividness that they lack not a scent, a sound, a line, a word, a look, a gesture!
I was twelve years old and he fifteen. It was at the seaside. Our parents were talking a few steps away, but night was falling and a fisherman's hut hid us from their eyes. He bent over to me and our lips met in a simple kiss, simple as a flower with petals still unopened, for we were both of us innocent....
I can still see the colour and the shape of the drifting clouds. I can smell the mingled breath of the sea and of his boyish mouth. I can remember how I felt as a frightened, trembling and enraptured little girl.... A sailor was singing some way off; and the gulls that circled between sea and sky seemed to be keeping the last rays of daylight upon their white wings.
Why, I know that boy's mouth by heart and shall always know it! We often kissed again, without even dreaming that, at this game as at all games, there might be room for progress!... And then ... and then ... that's all I remember of him.... The next is another memory, at another place and another age.... And then another again....
2
Would one not think that, in the more or less happy lives of us women, in our more or less easily traversed roads, the sensations of love are so many illuminated floral arches that mark the different stages of our accomplishment? We go up to them, we pass through them with hopes, smiles or sighs. But, whatever they may be, we come out of them fairer and better. What should we be without that, without love? The love which is rebuked, which we are supposed to hide and blush for! The love that entreats both our strength and our weakness, our patience and our fervour, our passion and our reason! The love that sets in motion our highest faculties and our lowest instincts, that makes each of us know her own power and her own poverty by the part which she allows it to play in her life!
In that moment, I saw and lived my joys in the kisses of childhood and girlhood. I travelled my road again; and the arches of light seemed higher to me and they followed hard on one another, becoming ever more radiant and decked with gayer flowers, until this very hour when the desired happiness has been found, established and kept fast....