Ah, shattered again! The music sets the hubbub going....
Besides, certain words are too beautiful, and you say them to intoxicate yourself, but when they are gone, you realize, your arms are empty.
I asked myself: "What is youth?" This is what youth is: that terrible thing, that sin, that torture which one must stifle: it is my pure intoxication defiled by their impure intoxication. I wanted to sing my youth, give it out, exhale it. Jeering life is below, with its people, its fouling habits, its sneers and titters. They were quite right; you can't escape it. You must adapt yourself to it; it is the law. I will adapt myself; I will have a husband; he will be kind, faithful; there will be no one beside him; he will be all in all to me; he will skirt the shores of my being; he will pronounce judgment on all my actions, my comings and goings, my looks; his word will be final. I shall lie in his bed every night; he will see my timid body, my naked sleep, my sleeping life; he will stand upright in my life as in a garden which one is not afraid to ravage, and when truth will pass by us, he will sit still and let it pass.
I shall have no more confused desires, no more sudden impulses of kindliness, no more agonized expectancy, and no more of those questionings which make a stifling desert about me. I shall be satisfied. If my hell returns at times to visit me, that red-eyed narrow-chested hell, my husband will be there, seated opposite me at table; he will raise his head. "What's the matter, aren't you hungry?"
The soul, the essence, the deep voice from within—words, mere words.... There is nothing but the noise below. And only that. And I must return to it. Well, come on, go down, speak, smile. All existences are alike. When there is no longer a single lie left to tell, it means the time has come to die.
Why obstinately wish to discover a way out and knock your head against a stone wall? There is no way out. You must not cherish the impossible; get up and go gaily downstairs. A little cold water, a little powder; this is a grief you are not permitted to indulge in.
Once again and for all time I shall go to them. If they are boisterous, spineless, unobservant, with no warmth in them, perhaps after all at some time at the bottom of their hearts they have felt, if only vaguely and vanishingly, the jealous fever which weighs like a heart; perhaps they have suffered; perhaps in looking back, when the sunshine has burst forth, they have understood that the period of their twenties was sacred. The twenties! And we, the youth, say to ourselves: wisdom is within us, the future is within us, and reason, salt, blood, the truth. It is ourselves, only ourselves. And we wish to open our hearts and say to those who pass: "Come to us, ask us. It is from us that everything can be learned; we can explain the secret things, the inner meanings, the words hidden in the folds of the body, the startling confessions that are breathed on the highways, everything that is changeful, for nothing is permanent but change; we know everything, and more than everything; we who have never loved, we know the whole of love." Perhaps they, the dancers downstairs, have stretched out their arms, tasted the fresh morning with their lips, felt the beating of a heart of sobs; perhaps they have once been their hope. I shall do what they have done; it is my turn; my time for withering will surely come too.
The farandole! Ah, they are holding each other's hands, the old folks are also joining in. "Let's enjoy ourselves!" Their faces are tense, and above their footsteps and above the avalanche of their bodies, I hear the shrill cries of the young girls.
They are leaving the drawing-room; it sounds as if they were approaching.
Don't come here. Even if it is dark in this room, even if I have wept, and even if the walls have taken on this aspect of distress, it does not mean that I can be reduced to your level.