His tall figure hemmed in by a group detaches itself, grows bigger, and becomes more recognizable step by step. I go to meet him, slowly, smiling despite myself as he hurries, and when our hands touch, my heart breaks into bloom.... An overwhelming instant ... a soft ecstasy ... fusion.... And every evening it is as if I had never found him....
Let us go by the boulevards. The weather is so lovely, we have plenty of time.
Our questions tumble over one another, clear away bothersome trifles, do not even wait for answers, take everything for granted—what happened during the day, all the details, everything, and more than everything.
As a matter of fact, what we listen to is our footsteps. We keep even pace, our tread makes the same sound. A discovery flooding the heart—it is a single step that is carrying us along.
We walk side by side, and the space between us does not divide us. We are followed and preceded by a whole procession of couples moving with a slowness strangely rhythmic which leaves a wake behind.
We have told everything, everything we know, and everything we are. It is not a question of being alike in order to be comrades, of springing from the same roots or having drunk from the same source. The thing is, for each to serve the truth which the other lives with the same heart as his own, different truth.
No, it is not a question of being alike. Haven't I observed a hundred times that we are very different? How can one wish it otherwise? How conceive that we whose age is not the same, whose bodies are so different, whose characters are well-defined, and whose careers are opposite should respond to the same influences? Why, each of us responds to the veriest trifles according to his own temperament.... Does he perceive as I do this street, the flower-beds of the big cafés, the crowd with glowing eyes, the gritty dust? Is this instant the same instant to him? I know it is not....
A block. How shall we get through? The crossing of the huge thoroughfares, with its din, its black swarming thousands, dashing motors, clanging of bells, tooting of horns, discharges its mechanical eruption upon the city. Let us run. He has slipped his strong arm under mine; we take long joyous strides and finally land in peaceful territory out of breath and radiant.
Here at last is a boulevard where one can breathe, then an old countrified street where silence has nested. We plunge into its tranquillity.