We would read together by the light of the fire, into which she often threw the letters that her husband sent her every day from the Front. Judging by their frequent expressions of anxiety I guessed that Marthe's letters to him were becoming less and less tender and less and less frequent. It was not without a certain disquiet that I watched those letters burn. For a second the fire became much brighter; the truth was I was afraid to see more clearly.

Marthe would often ask me if it was really true that I had loved her ever since our first meeting, and reproached me for not telling her before she was married. Had I done so, she said, she would never have married Jacques. For although at first she had felt a sort of love for him, it had diminished as the period of their engagement became longer and longer on account of the war. By the time she married Jacques she no longer loved him at all. She had hoped that her feelings would change during the fortnight's leave Jacques had been given

He was clumsy. The one who loves always annoys the one who does not. And Jacques loved her more than ever. His letters showed that he was unhappy, but that he held his Marthe too highly in his esteem to believe that she would be capable of infidelity. He blamed only himself, begging her to tell him what he had done to offend her; 'I feel so coarse when I am with you. I feel everything I say hurts you.' Marthe replied simply that this was not so and that she had nothing to reproach him with.

It was now the beginning of March. Spring was early. On the days when Marthe did not come with me into Paris she was waiting for me in the evening on my return from art school. Naked beneath her dressing-gown, she lay in front of the fire. Olive-wood from her parents-in-law's estate burned in the hearth. She had asked them to renew her supply. I do not know what held me back. Perhaps it was simply the fear of doing something one has never done before. I was reminded of Daphnis. But in this case it was Chloe who had been given one or two lessons and Daphnis did not dare to ask her to teach him. Besides, I tended to regard Marthe as a virgin, given over during the first fortnight of her marriage into the arms of an unknown man, who had taken her several times by force.

Alone in my bed at night I spoke Marthe's name, furious with myself - I who regarded myself as a man - for not being man enough to make her my mistress. Each time I went to see her I swore I would not leave until she was.

On my sixteenth birthday, In March 1918, she gave me a dressing-gown like her own. She hoped I would not be angry but she wanted to see me try it on there. I was so happy that I nearly made a pun; something I never did. My toga praetexta, my pretext! For I realised that what had inhibited me was a sense of the ridiculous, of feeling dressed when she was not. At first I was going to put the dressing gown on that same day. Then, blushing, I saw what a reproach this present implied.