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who gave her her jewels, her dresses, her car, took me aside and said: “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Yes, she was beautiful. I never saw her again. Is Ren=E9 what I might have become had I been a man? Devoted to another, to the point of yielding everything to him, without even finding it anachronistic, this vassal-to-lord relationship? I’m afraid the answer is yes. Whereas the imaginary Jacqueline was the stranger par excellence. It took me a long time to realize, however, that in another life a girl like her-one whom I admired unequivocally-had taken my lover away from me. And I took my revenge by shipping her off to Roissy, I who pretended to disdain any form of vengeance, I took revenge and wasn’t even capable of realizing it. To make up a story is a curious trap. As for Sir Stephen, I saw him, literally, in the flesh. My current lover, the one I just mentioned, pointed him out to me one afternoon in a bar near the Champs Elys=E9es: half-seated on a stool at the mahogany bar, silent, self-composed, with that air of some gray-eyed prince that fascinates both men and women-he pointed him out to me and said: “I don’t understand why women don’t prefer men like him to boys under thirty.” At the time he was under thirty. I didn’t respond.’ But they do prefer them. I stared for a long time at the unknown man, who wasn’t even looking at me.
    =46ifty years old probably, an Englishman certainly. And what else? Nothing. But this silent, unilateral rapport between him and my companion, between him and me, reappeared out of the blue ten years later, in the middle of the night pierced by the light of my table lamp, and the hand on the paper brought him back to life -with a new meaning even quicker than reflection. Anne-Marie, I don’t know at all. One of my woman friends (whom I respect, and I am slow to respect) might well be Anne-Marie were it not for the fact that she is the epitome of purity and honor: I mean that Anne-Marie might have got from her her rigor and her resolve, her free and easy manner, and straightforward, unequivocal way in which she exercised her profession. To tell the truth, the professions in question (O’s and Anne-Marie’s, prostitute or procuress, to make things utterly clear) are outside my sphere of knowledge. A major writer outraged by the publication of O thought he saw in my story the memoirs of a courtesan-admitting by way of excuse that he had not read the book-but he was wrong on two scores: they are not memoirs, and I am not a courtesan, however delicate the expression may be. Let us say so as not to offend him that it was doubtless a matter of having missed my chosen calling. After the abbreviated cast of characters, as at the theater, is there any point in clarifying the places where the action occurs? They belong to everyone. The rue de Poitiers and the private room at La Perouse, the room in the whorehouse-hotel near the Bastille, with its mirror on the ceiling, the streets in the vicinity of St. Germain, the sundrenched quays of the ile St. Louis, the dry, whitened stones of the back country of Provence, and this Roissy-en-France glimpsed during a brief excursion one spring, scarcely more than a place-name on a map-of course nothing is made up, not anymore than the asters which I said earlier we would have occasion to mention again. Nor did I make up-steal, rather, for which I ask her belated pardon, but the theft was committed out of admiration-the Leonor Fini masks. I also, it would seem, stole a lady’s living room, for some unspeakable purpose: Sir Stephen’s living room, no less! She told me so herself, not realizing of course to whom she was speaking (one never knows to whom one is speaking). Never have I set foot in that lady’s house, never have I laid eyes on her living room. Nor had I ever seen (and did not even know it existed) the house hidden in a hollow where for years a girl whom I subsequently chanced to meet gave exhibitions for the man she