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superimposedimages of the women who have come into their lives, and the appalling suffering inflicted on us by one woman often becomes the reason we inspire love in another … and the cause of her unhappiness.
    M was Mary Graham, a little English girl whose eyes were shrouded in mystery and whom I met at my aunt Cora’s house. I must tell you about this aunt because she has an intermittent but not insignificant role in the rest of my story. She is one of my mother’s sisters. She married a banker, Baron Choin, and, although I have never known why, always cherished ambitions of playing host to as many ministers, ambassadors, and generals as possible. She established her first nucleus of acquaintances by being mistress to a fairly well-known politician, and earned her victory by exploiting this success methodically and with admirable perseverance. She was to be found on the avenue Marceau from six o’clock every evening, and every Tuesday she gave a dinner for twenty-four. Aunt Cora’s dinners were one of the few subjects about which my Limousin family joked. My father claimed, and I think he was right, that the series never suffered an interruption. In summer, the dinners moved to the villa in Trouville. My mother said that when sheknew my uncle was about to die (he was suffering from stomach cancer), she went to Paris to help her sister and arrived on a Tuesday evening to find Cora setting the table.
    “What about Adrien?” she asked.
    “He’s very well,” Cora replied, “as well as his condition will allow, only he won’t be able to dine at the table.”
    At seven o’clock the following morning, a servant called my mother: “Madame the Baroness regrets to inform Madame Marcenat that Monsieur the Baron died suddenly in the night.”
    When I first came to Paris, I had no wish to see my aunt, having been brought up by my father to abhor the social scene. When I met her I did not dislike her. She was a very good woman who liked to help others and, through her connections with men who held a variety of positions, had acquired a haphazard but genuine knowledge of the workings of a company. For the inquisitive, provincial young man that I was, she was a mine of information. She could see I enjoyed listening to her and took to me as a friend. I was invited to avenue Marceau every Tuesday evening. Perhaps there was added coquettishness in her inviting me because she knew that mymother and father were hostile to her salons, and she was not against triumphing over them by commandeering me.
    Aunt Cora’s gatherings inevitably included a number of young ladies as necessary bait. I undertook to win several of them over. I wooed them without loving them, as a point of honor and to prove to myself that victory was possible. I remember that whenever one of them left my bedroom with a tender smile, I would calmly sit down in an armchair, pick up a book, and effortlessly drive away her image.
    Do not judge me too severely. I think that, like me, many young men who do not quickly find a truly remarkable mistress or wife almost inevitably resort to this aloof egotism. They are hoping to find a way of living. Women instinctively know that these enterprises are pointless and enter into them only condescendingly. Desire creates illusions for a while and then invincible boredom rears up within these two almost hostile characters. Was I still thinking of Helen of Sparta? That was a feeling I glimpsed deep below the surface, an underwater cathedral beneath the dark depths of my cold strategies.
    Occasionally when I went to concerts on Sunday evenings, I would catch sight of a ravishing profile in the distance, and with a strange jolt I would remember the blond Slavic queen of my childhood and the chestnut trees of Gandumas. All through the concert I would offer the powerful emotions stirred by the music to this stranger’s face, and I had the fleeting feeling that if I could only get to know this woman, I would finally find in her the