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1906–1907, I can see a good many days marked with the letter D. Denise Aubry disappointed me. I was wrong. She was a nice enough woman but, though I cannot say why, I had hoped she would prove to be a studying companion as well as a mistress. She came to Paris to see me and to try on gowns and hats. This inspired strong feelings of contempt in me: I lived inside books and could not understand how anyone could do otherwise. She asked me to lend herGide, Barrès, and Claudel about whom I talked so much; what she then said about them wounded me. She had a pretty body, and I longed for her desperately the moment she went home to Limoges. But after two hours spent with her, I wished I could die, evaporate, or have a proper conversation with a male friend.
    My two greatest companions were André Halff, an intelligent but rather touchy young Jew I had met at law school, and Bertrand de Jussac, a classmate from Limoges who had enrolled at the Saint-Cyr military academy and came to spend Sundays with us in Paris. When I was with Halff or Bertrand I felt I was diving into a seam of perfect sincerity. On the surface was the Philippe my parents knew, a simple creature sharing some Marcenat conventions along with some feeble elements of resistance, then came Denise Aubry’s Philippe, prone to bouts of sensuality and tenderness and reacting to this with brutality, then Bertrand’s Philippe, courageous and sentimental, and last the one Halff knew, precise and uncompromising. I was also well aware that, somewhere underneath, there was yet another Philippe, one who was more real than all the others, and he alone could have made me happy if I had coincidedwith him, but I made no effort even to get to know him.
    Have I told you about the room I rented in a small house on the rue de Varenne, furnished in the austere style I favored at the time? A mask of Pascal and one of Beethoven hung on the bare walls. Strange witnesses to my exploits. The divan that served as my bed was covered with a large gray cloth. On the mantelpiece there was one book by Spinoza, one by Montaigne, and a few scientific volumes. Was that out of a desire to surprise or a genuine love of ideas? A mixture of the two, I would say. I was studious and inhuman.
    Denise often told me my room frightened her but that she liked it all the same. She had had many lovers before me; she had always dominated them. She grew fond of me—I mention that in all humility. Life teaches us all that, where love is concerned, modesty is easy. Even the most underprivileged can sometimes appeal and the most alluring fail. I can tell you that Denise felt more for me than I did for her, but I will be just as sincere in describing the far more significant episodes in my life when thesituation was completely reversed. In the period we are looking at, that is, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, I was loved but I loved little myself. If the truth be known, I had no idea what love was. The thought that it could cause pain struck me as intolerably romantic. Poor Denise, I can picture her lying full length on that divan, leaning over me and anxiously asking questions of my face that remained so utterly closed to her.
    “Love,” I would say, “what is love?”
    “Don’t you know what it is? You shall … You’ll be caught too.”
    That word
caught
struck me, I found it crude. I did not care for Denise’s vocabulary and resented her for not talking like Juliet or Clelia Conti. I responded to her person with the sort of exasperation some might show for a badly cut gown. I drew back, then came closer, trying to find an impossible balance. I learned later that over this period she earned a reputation in Limoges for her intelligence, and that my efforts had helped her win the heart of one of the most difficult men in the province. It seems women’s minds are made up of the successive sediments laid down by the men who have loved them, just as men’s tastes retain jumbled,