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perfect, almost divine creature for whom I wished to live. Then the fallen queen would be lost in the crowd and I would go back to a mistress I did not love on the rue de Varenne.
    I now struggle to grasp how I could have harbored two such contradictory personalities. They lived on different planes and never met. The tender lover who hankered for devotion had realized that his beloved did not exist in real life. Refusing to confuse an adored but ill-defined image with the unworthy, vulgar individuals who had walk-on parts in his life, he took refuge in books and saved his love for Madame de Mortsauf and Madame de Rênal. The cynic dined with Aunt Cora and, if he liked the woman seated beside him, entertained her with bright and daring conversation.
    After my military service, my father invited me to run our factory with him. He had now moved his offices to Paris, where most of his customers, major newspapers and publishing houses, were based. I was very interested in his business and helped develop it while still pursuing my studies and my reading. I went to Gandumas once a month in winter; in summer my parents lived there and I spent a few weeks with them. I enjoyed rediscovering my solitary childhood walks through Limousin. When I was not at the factory, I worked either in my bedroom (still the same one) or in my little observatory overlooking the Loue ravine. Every hour I would get to my feet, walk to the end of the long avenue of chestnut trees, and walk back at the same brisk pace and return to my reading.
    I was glad to be rid of the young women who strung a flimsy but unavoidable web of meetings, complaints, and gossip over my life in Paris. The Mary Graham I mentioned earlier was the wife of a man I knew well. I did not like shaking her husband’s hand. Most of my friends would actually have taken ironic pride in doing so. But my family’s traditions on such subjects were strict. My father’s marriage of convenience had, as is so often the case,become a marriage of love. He was happy in his own silent and serious way. He never had affairs, at least not after he was married, and yet I sensed a romantic side to him and was obscurely aware that if, like him, I were lucky enough to find a woman something like my Amazon, I too could be happy and faithful.

. IV .
    In the winter of 1909 I was struck down by bronchitis twice in succession and, toward the month of March, our doctor recommended I spend a few weeks in the south. I thought it would be more interesting to visit Italy, a country I did not know. I saw the northern lakes and Venice, and settled in Florence for the final week of my vacation. The first evening, I noticed a young lady at the next table in the hotel; she had an ethereal, angelic beauty, and I could not take my eyes off her. She was accompanied by her mother, who seemed still young, and a somewhat older man. As I left the dining room, I asked the headwaiter who my neighbors were. Hetold me they were French, they were Madame and Mademoiselle Malet. Their companion, an Italian general, was not staying in our hotel. At lunchtime the following day their table was empty.
    I had letters of recommendation for several inhabitants of Florence including one for Professor Angelo Guardi, the art critic whose publisher was a customer of mine. I had the letter delivered to him and the very same day received an invitation to take tea with him. There, in the gardens of a villa in Fiesole, I discovered some twenty people among whom were my two neighbors. Beneath a wide straw hat and wearing an unbleached linen dress with a blue sailor collar, the young lady looked as lovely as she had the day before. All at once I felt shy and moved away from the group she was in, to go and talk to Guardi. Below us there was a pergola covered in roses.
    “I made my garden myself,” Guardi said. “Ten years ago all the land you can see was a meadow. Over there …”
    As I looked to where he was pointing, my eyes met those of