How many feminine souls there are whose hidden genius expresses itself like hers in this inner stream! If one could read below the surface one would often find there dark passions, ecstasies, visions of the abyss. Yet all one sees is the correct middle-class woman, tranquilly going on from day to day, attending to her affairs, coolly and sensibly, mistress of herself and sometimes even, by reaction, assuming as Annette did before her pupils and her son (though he was never deceived), an almost excessive appearance of cold, moralistic reasonableness. No, she did not deceive the child. He had sharp eyes. He was able to read between the lines. He too knew what dreams were. Every day he had hours when he was like a king, entirely alone with his dreams, alone in the apartment. Annette, who was always imprudent, carelessly left at the disposal of the child a quantity of books, debris from the shipwreck of her library and that of the grandfather. They were of every sort. For several years she had not had the leisure to hunt through them. The little boy took charge of that. Every day, on his return from school, when his mother was not there, he would set out on the chase. He read at haphazard. Quite early he had learned to read quickly, very quickly; he galloped down the slope of the pages, pursuing his quarry. His school-work suffered from this; he was classed as a poor, scatter-brained student who never knew his lessons and skimped his duties. The teacher would have been very much surprised if the little poacher had recited what his eyes had caught in his game-preserve. He had even caught the "classics" in his snare, and what a different scent they had! Everything he gathered freely in this way, in the unknown, had for him the taste of beautiful forbidden fruit. There was nothing that could soil him yet in these encounters, nothing that could even enlighten him too brutally. His eyes passed merrily round dangerous corners without even seeing the carnal bait in the trap. But, happy and carefree, he felt the breath of warm life in his face; in this forest of books his nostrils caught the adventure and the eternal struggle of love. Love, what is love for a child of ten? All the happiness one does not possess, that one will possess--that one is going to seize. . . . What will it look like? With a few scraps of what he has seen and heard, he tries to construct its image. He sees nothing. He sees everything. He desires everything. To possess everything. To love everything. (To be loved! For him that is the real meaning of love. . . . "I love myself. I must be loved. . . . But by whom?") His memories give him no aid. They are too close for him to be able to see them well. At his age there is no past, or so little of a past. The present is the theme with its thousand variations.