We write to taste life twice; in the moment and in retrospect.

She says of me, 'You are at once so decadent and so alive.' She is so decadent and alive. Our love would be death.

I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, I want to do violence to her. Her subtlety makes me desire frankness; the quicksands of her evasions make me, for the first time, demand clarity.

In the obvious and enveloping warmth of my admiration, she expanded.

But June's night life was internal, it glowed from within her and it came, in part, from her treating every encounter as either intimate, or to be forgotten.

When she talks, she has the same expression of intensity she must have while making love.

She is a personality expanded to the limit. I worship that courage to hurt which she has, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it.

'Your strength, Anaïs, is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.'

Does she know that I feel lost in her, that I no longer understand what she is saying, feeling only the warmth of her words, their vividness?

Will she die? What anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her.

She said, 'The other night at Monteparnasse I was hurt to hear your name mentioned by men like Titus. I don't want to see cheap men crawl into your life. I feel rather... protective.'

Then she slips her hand over mine, and we lock hands. The chestnut trees are shedding their pollen in wispy parachutes, and the street lamps in the fog wear thin gold halos around them like the heads of saints.

And I want to become immersed with her.

I love warm colors, red and gold.

I say to her, 'You're the only woman who ever answered the  fantasies I had about what a woman should be.'

She only believed in those words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.

I divined her life at that moment. She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city.

...the light set her off the turquoise wall. Her blonde hair piled high and carelessly on her head, pallid face, peaked eyebrows, a sly smile, with a disarming dimple. Perfidious, I felt, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death.