forgives in those one loves the vagaries or excesses one readily forgives in others. She was wrong to be afraid: “Ah, keep at it,” he said. What happens after that? Do you know? She knew. She discovered it by slow degrees. During the rest of the waning summer, throughout the fall, from the torrid beaches of some dismal watering spot until her return to a russet and burnt-out Paris, she wrote what she knew. Ten pages at a time, or five, full chapters or fragments of chapters, she slipped her pages, the same size as the original notebook, written sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink, whether ballpoint or the fine point of a real fountain pen, into envelopes and addressed them to the same General Delivery address. No carbon copy, no first draft: she kept nothing. But the postal service came through. The story was still not completely written when, having resumed their assignations back in Paris in the fall, the man asked her to read sections out loud to him, as she wrote them. And in the dark car, in the middle of an afternoon on some bleak but busy street, near the Buttes-aux-Cailles, where you have the feeling you’re transported back to the last years of the previous century, or on the banks of the St. Martin Canal, the girl who was reading had to stop, break off, once or more than once, because it is possible silently to imagine the worst, the most burning detail, but not read out loud what was dreamt in the course of interminable nights.
And yet one day the story did stop. Before O, there was nothing further that that death toward which she was vaguely racing with all her might could do, that death which is granted her in two lines. As for revealing how the manuscript came into the hands of Jean Paulhan, I promised not to reveal it, as I promised not to divulge the real name of Pauline R=E9age, counting on the courtesy and integrity of those who are privy to it to keep the secret as long as I feel bound not to break that promise. Besides, nothing is more fallacious and shifting than an identity. If you believe, as hundreds of millions of men do, that we live several lives, why not also believe that in each of our lives we are the meeting place for several souls? “Who am I, finally,” said Pauline R=E9age, “if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through the subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself?” Whence came to me those oft-repeated reveries, those slow musings just before falling asleep, always the same ones, in which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint, I’m not sure which. All I know is that they were beneficent and protected me mysteriously-contrary to all the reasonable reveries that revolve around our daily lives, trying to organize it, to tame it. I have never known how to tame my life. And yet it seemed indeed as though these strange dreams were a help in that direction, as though some ransom had been paid by the delirium and delights of the impossible: the days that followed were oddly lightened by them, whereas the orderly arrangement of the future and the best-laid plans founded on good common sense proved each time to be contradicted by the event itself. Thus I learned at a very tender age that you should not spend the empty hours of the night building dream castles, nonexistent but possible, workable, where friends and relatives would be happy together (how fanciful!)-but that one could without fear build and furnish clandestine castles, on the condition that you people them with girls in love, prostituted by love, and triumphant in their chains. So it was that Sade’s castles, discovered long after I had silently built my own, never surprised me, as I was not surprised by the
And yet one day the story did stop. Before O, there was nothing further that that death toward which she was vaguely racing with all her might could do, that death which is granted her in two lines. As for revealing how the manuscript came into the hands of Jean Paulhan, I promised not to reveal it, as I promised not to divulge the real name of Pauline R=E9age, counting on the courtesy and integrity of those who are privy to it to keep the secret as long as I feel bound not to break that promise. Besides, nothing is more fallacious and shifting than an identity. If you believe, as hundreds of millions of men do, that we live several lives, why not also believe that in each of our lives we are the meeting place for several souls? “Who am I, finally,” said Pauline R=E9age, “if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through the subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself?” Whence came to me those oft-repeated reveries, those slow musings just before falling asleep, always the same ones, in which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint, I’m not sure which. All I know is that they were beneficent and protected me mysteriously-contrary to all the reasonable reveries that revolve around our daily lives, trying to organize it, to tame it. I have never known how to tame my life. And yet it seemed indeed as though these strange dreams were a help in that direction, as though some ransom had been paid by the delirium and delights of the impossible: the days that followed were oddly lightened by them, whereas the orderly arrangement of the future and the best-laid plans founded on good common sense proved each time to be contradicted by the event itself. Thus I learned at a very tender age that you should not spend the empty hours of the night building dream castles, nonexistent but possible, workable, where friends and relatives would be happy together (how fanciful!)-but that one could without fear build and furnish clandestine castles, on the condition that you people them with girls in love, prostituted by love, and triumphant in their chains. So it was that Sade’s castles, discovered long after I had silently built my own, never surprised me, as I was not surprised by the
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