4 
just entered by surprise, is so cool. I say hello to the coolness, 
without in the least needing those words which human creatures 
use for their greetings. Alas! the coolness is not the only thing 
that took advantage of the door. I had forgotten that which, in 
my past, I had learned to call my self. A human creature is 
trying its best to remind me. It insists. It kisses me. It is 
proper to return politeness for politeness, and so the pretenses 
begin again. “Hello spirit clothed in a body.” I like these 
words, I repeat them. Spirit is right, I would love to create for 
myself the purity of a chess-player, not to renounce with joy, but 
to play, to act, to revel in thoughts. No human contact ever 
prevented my being lonely, then what is the good of soiling one 
self. Through, with the pleasures (?) of the flesh. 
For the third time I repeat: Hello spirit clothed in a body. 
And thus I give the measure of a new confidence, to him who 
enters. 
Alas, misfortune had designed me merely to be present in 
a body that believes itself clothed in spirit. A laugh, I get angry 
and mark the contrast that exists between that other one and me. 
My spirit is clothed in a body, as to thee thy body is clothed with 
spirit. I forsee the blow, parry it, receive it anyway. Then I 
am not alone any more. It is final. Good day, good night. I 
will go and see how the sun gets up in the Bois de Boulogne. I 
walked. Chilly shreds of dawn were clinging to the trees. A 
little boat, abandoned by man, was fast rusting. Happy in its 
solitude. “Alone like me. Alone. Illusion again. It seems 
that the other one had followed me: I hear its voice: “It is the 
yacht of that actress who was drowned in the Rhine. The yacht 
of that actress who was drowned in the Rhine.” Yes, I remem 
ber. Remember. Again forever. He was apparently right, 
that teacher of Philosophy of mine, who claimed that the present 
did not exist. But this is beside the question. A yacht is aban 
doned on the Seine. Who would dare live in it since an actress 
plunged off it, to drown herself in the Rhine, in a night orgy, in 
the summer of 1911. 
1911. The year of my first communion. A night of orgy, 
repeated the cook commenting upon the suicide which easily 
might be a murder. In my dreams orgy rhymed with host. 
Why was I offered so early these sinful or wretched crea 
tures, to love? I wished the rivers cursed, the canals, through 
which had been towed, to the bridge of Suresness, this peniche 
the last worldly home of a woman who, in my innocence having 
faith in programs and magazines, I believed to be happy. “She 
is a queen in our Paris” so liked to say a friend of my mother, 
who was fond of splendors. 
Then, did she also feel herself miserably free in her solitude