one wakes up from life, and sees a different brilliance in the
daylight, and recreates everything, I call that purity.

. . . . .

"Do you remember the day we lost our way in the cab in Paris--the day he
thought he recognised us from a distance, and jumped into another cab
to follow us?"

She gave a start of ecstasy.

"Oh, yes," she murmured, "that was the great day!"

His voice quivered as if shaken by the throbbing of his heart, and his
heart said:

"Kneeling on the seat, you looked out of the little window in the back
of the cab and cried to me, 'He is nearer! He is further off! He will
catch us. I do not see him any more. He has lost us.' Ah!"

And with one and the same movement their lips joined.

She breathed out like a sigh:

"That was the one time I enjoyed."

"We shall always be afraid," he said.

These words interlaced and changed into kisses. Their whole life
surged into their lips.

Yes, they had to revive their past so as to love each other, they had
constantly to be reassembling the pieces so as to keep their love from
dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing, in darkness and in
dust, in an icy ebbing away, the ruin of old age, the impress of death.

They clasped each other.

They were drowned in the darkness. They fell down, down into the
shadows, into the abyss that they had willed.

He stammered:

"I will love you always."

But she and I both felt that he was lying again. We did not deceive
ourselves. But what matter, what matter?

Her lips on his lips, she murmured like a thorny caress among the
caresses:

"My husband will soon be home."

How little they really were at one! How, actually, there was nothing
but their fear that they had in common, and how they stirred their fear
up desperately. But their tremendous effort to commune somehow was
soon to be over.

They stopped talking. Words had already accomplished the work of
reviving their love. She merely murmured:

"I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give
myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?"

"Are you happy?" she asked again.

"I swear you are everything in the world to me."

* * * * * * * * *

Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she
said almost plaintively:

"May God bless the bit of pleasure one has."

A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer
blasphemous yet divine.