“Did Jean Azévédo dread this destiny for me? He assured me that it would have never occurred to him to talk about such matters to Anne, because apart from her affections, she was quite a simple soul, with little power of resistance, and would soon have sunk into slavery: ‘But you! I feel in all your words a hunger and thirst for truth.’ Shall I report faithfully all these conversations to Bernard? It is madness to hope that he would understand a word of them. He must realise, in any case, that I did not surrender without a struggle. I remember arguing against the lad that he was adorning with clever phrases what in fact was moral degradation. I even had recourse to memories of the lectures on ethics at the _Lycée_. ‘Self-realisation?’ I repeated: ‘but we only exist in so far as we make ourselves what we are.’ Azévédo denied that there was any degradation worse than that of self-betrayal. He maintained there was not a hero nor a saint, who had but once or twice explored the mysteries of his soul, without soon reaching all its limits: ‘We must go beyond ourselves to find God,’ he would say. And again: ‘To accept ourselves as we are, compels the best among us to meet ourselves face to face, openly and in fair fight. And that is why it often happens that these enlightened souls become converted to the narrowest creed.’” She would not discuss with Bernard the justification for this morality;--she would even admit that these were doubtless the feeblest sophisms; “but he must understand, he must make an effort to understand, how deeply a woman like myself could be affected by them and what I felt in the evening in the dining-room at Argelouse: Bernard, ensconced in the neighbouring kitchen, was taking off his boots, and relating in dialect the result of the day’s shooting. The captive pigeons struggled in the heaving bag on the table: Bernard ate slowly, full of the joy of his reconquered appetite,--lovingly counted out the drops of ‘Fowler’: ‘That is health,’ he used to say. There was a large fire burning and at dessert he had only to turn his chair to stretch out his feet, in their felt shoes, to the flames. His eyes closed over _La Petite Gironde_. Sometimes he snored, but as often as not I did not even hear him breathe. Balionte’s slippers still shuffled about the kitchen; then she brought in the candlesticks. After that, silence: the silence of Argelouse. People who do not know those deserted moors do not know what silence is: it encircles the house as if embodied in that thick mass of forest in which nothing lives, except from time to time a hooting owl (we seem to be listening in the night to the sound of the sob we dare not utter).