your inflection,
and when I am animated I feel I have made some of your ideas my own. If
I don't remember you so clearly, it is because I _live_ you and the
legacy you left me rises and falls with my breathing.

In my fierce survival I have preserved only what is of use to me. All
the rest has decomposed; it is nothing to me any more. We should break
away from this burden of the dead. The dead are the living who have
abandoned us, and sooner or later, whether we wish to or not, we forget
them.

* * * * *

I loved my dead dearly, so dearly that it seemed to me my being inclined
towards them the moment they appeared--so dearly that because of them,
who have gone, love has remained.

Love proclaims its law. You must show your love, it cries.

Somewhere in the world to-night there are faces lying dormant for me,
persons to whom I have things to say. I am waiting for them, I stretch
my arms out to them, I know they will come because of my need for
embraces, a desire for caresses, so strong to-night that I jump up with
a start. It is as if half of my body were missing. I see myself deserted
and frightfully widowed, and my mouth quivers with hunger and thirst for
another mouth.

I know a man is on the way. I shall recognize him. I shall have the
somewhat bitter audacity you must have in order to confess yourself the
immense thing you are. I shall stir him, I shall do everything; you can
go the full lengths of the sublime that dwells within you.

As soon as he will rise above the horizon he will realize from my mere
expression that I have long lost the trick of lying.

And when I read the first glance he gives me, when desire bewilders him
a little and forces him back within himself, I shall be happy to be
beautiful. Beneath his eyes my sound healthy self will brace up again,
my inexhaustible twenty-seven years, my rounded limbs, everything which
goes slightly to pieces when love is absent. Here is the offering,
blond, slim, laughing, which I already present to you.... He will
perceive uncomprehendingly that if I am a little more beautiful than
myself, it is because by virtue of loving one comes to resemble the love
one feels.

When he will have looked at me long, I will explain what each of my
features means; I will speak. Because silence is beautiful after the
last words, and it is the woman who has the most to say.

I may have a stronger expression than other women, perhaps a slight