"December: Every time I come back from the Rue Cassini, it seems to me, as I enter my house, that I put on a mask or hide something I have stolen. It is a sensation of cruel restraint. But the welcome I receive dissipates it at once. There is no comparison whatsoever between the intellectual stimulation which I experience in my unlimited conversations with Anne, and the colorless calm which awaits me at home. I now feel the need of that thought and our excitement to make me know that I am alive. And I am growing accustomed to this sort of double life. "How can a woman so blindly accept the deepest of all separations, the moral separation? After more than seven years of marriage, I am still amazed at it. She lacks curiosity as she does distrust. The daily round satisfies her. Just now I was studying her under the lamplight. She is scarcely thirty, and her expressionless face reveals no doubt of the heart, no personal thought. She can see in me neither a new joy, nor despair. I am all in all to her, but I do not know to-day how I have been able to please her. I no longer think of her love. Nevertheless I am so weak or so complex that her youth still touches me, and that my desire to animate her, futile as it is, is not entirely crushed. I have loved her too much for her happiness or grief ever to be indifferent to me, yet I am giving myself with delight to the danger which threatens us. The younger we are, the less we can discern in reality the object of our devotion. We modify it, we recreate it, and later, when we awake to our mistake, we blame the object, instead of our capacity to idealize. We should know how to make use of the truth, which, although different, still has its attractions. But we do not forgive it for having deceived us. "What I am passionately fond of never interests Elizabeth. She does not know or else she disregards the treasures of life. Either through thoughtlessness or indifference, she takes no part in it and narrows her life, when I try to enlarge it. We live together: she knows nothing of me and never will. There is neither discussion nor intimacy between us. It is the peace of the household, of so many households unconsciously divided against themselves. Children and the active life of Paris give to this secret divorce an appearance of harmony." "December 28th: Marie Louise and Philippe are asked to two children's matinées on the same day. Philippe would try to get out of going to both of them, but his sister will give up neither. She is offered her choice: she goes from one to the other, and as soon as we wish to carry out her decision, she takes it back. Her desire for amusement is not gratified by one affair." "January 1st, 1905: What has this New Year in store for us? "Anne is very sad on these days of family gatherings, and wishes to hide it from me. "'One cannot help regretting Christmas,' she said to me with a smile, belied by the drooping corners of her mouth.