[…] Although she was several months older than I was, she had a very young face which the disease had hardly touched. It is true that she wore make-up, but without make-up she seemed even younger, she was almost too young, so that the main effect of the disease was to give her the features of an adolescent. Only her eyes, which were larger, blacker, and more brilliant than they should have been—and sometimes pushed from their sockets by the fever—had an abnormal fixity. In a photograph taken during September her eyes are so large and so serious that one must fight against their expression in order to see her smile, though her smile is very conspicuous.

After I spoke to the doctor, I told her, "He gives you another month."

"Well, I'll tell that to the queen mother, who doesn't believe I'm really ill."

I don't know whether she wanted to live or die. During the last few months, the disease she had been fighting for ten years had been making her life more limited every day, and now she cursed both the disease and life itself with all the violence she could rouse. Some time before, she had thought seriously of killing herself. One evening I advised her to do it. That same evening, after listening to me, unable to talk because of her shortness of breath, but sitting up at her table like a healthy person, she wrote down several sentences that she wished to keep secret. I got these sentences from her, in the end, and I still have them. They consist of a few words of instruction: she asks her family to make the funeral as simple as possible and expressly forbids anyone to visit her grave; she also makes a small legacy to A., one of her friends, the sister-in-law of a fairly well-known dancer.

No mention of me. I can see how bitter she had felt when she heard me agree to her suicide. When I think it over carefully, as I did afterwards, I realize that this consent was hardly excusable, was even dishonest, since it vaguely rose from the thought that she should have been dead long ago, but not only was she not dead, she had continued to live, love, laugh, run around the city, like someone whom illness could not touch. Her doctor had told me that from 1936 on he had considered her dead. Of course the same doctor, who treated me several times, once told me, too, "Since you should have been dead two years ago, everything that remains of your life is a reprieve." He had just given me six more months to live and that was seven years ago. But he had an important reason for wishing me six feet under­ground. What he said only suggested what he wanted to happen. In J.'s case, though, I think he was telling the truth.

I hardly remember how the scene ended. It seems to me she meant to tear up the piece of paper. But as I gave it back to her I was seized by a great tenderness for her, a great admiration for her courage, for that cold and watchful look in the face of death. I can still see her at her table, silently writing those final and strange words. That tiny will, in keeping with her property less, already dispossessed existence, that last thought, from which I was excluded, touched me infinitely. In it I recognized her violence, her secrecy; I saw that she was at liberty to fight even me up to the last second. She cried often and for long stretches. But her tears were never the tears of a coward. During very violent scenes she hit me two or three times, and I should have stopped her, because as soon as she realized what she had done she was upset, almost terrified: terrified at having touched me and also at having done something mean, but even more at having to recognize her un­governable excitement, against which I offered no defense. She felt punished by it, offended, and endan­gered. Yet if she had tried to kill me, I would no doubt have warded off her blows. I could not have caused her the sadness of killing me. A year or two earlier, a young woman had shot at me with a revolver, after vainly waiting for me to disarm her. But I did not love that young woman. As it happened, she killed herself some time after that.

So for these reasons I kept that piece of paper, and for the few strange words it contained. Suicide disap­peared from her thoughts. The disease left her no more breathing space. In those days her sister did not live with her all the time. Or at least, leading the sort of life she did, she was often absent, and might or might not return home at night. ]. had a cleaning woman who came at meal times, but during the holidays she did not come. So J. was often left alone. The concierge, who liked her fairly well, went up to see her. She had only a few friends, although in the past she had gone out frequently. Even A., whom she was glad to see, bored her. But she would have welcomed anyone, because when she was alone she was afraid. She was very brave, but she was afraid. She was always very afraid of "the night. When I first met her, in a hotel where I was staying at the time, she was in a little room on the second floor and I was in a fairly large room on the third. I can't say I knew her, since I had only crossed her path and greeted her several times. But one night she wakened with a start and felt the presence of someone she took to be me standing at the foot of her bed; shortly afterwards she heard the door close and footsteps move away down the hall.

[…]

At a certain moment, the uneasiness disappeared completely and reason returned to me, at least a fairly cool and lucid feeling which said to me: the time has come, now you have to do what has to be done. I was living in a hotel in the rue S.; I still had the room in the other hotel, but since the landlord had been called up and the hotel was nearly empty, I had nothing there but some books and I almost never went there; I did not go there at night unless it was really necessary. I did not like the hotel in rue S., which was roomy and comfortable. Because of a whim which I do not under­stand, I had asked N. never to go there; one morning she had called me there and as I talked to her my bad temper had been so intense that even now I hate that place because of what I said. I felt incapable of spending the night there. The strange thing was that I never thought she might be waiting for me there; I did not even look in the lobby, nor in the lounge, where Central European diplomats engaged in endless conversations, heaping up the greatest visions of unhappiness. I went to ask for a room in a rather shady hotel in the next street, but there were no more rooms available there. I crossed rue de la Paix, which was extraordinarily quiet, and without light. How quiet it was, and how tranquil I was, too. I could hear my footsteps. Rue d'O. was not quiet, but gloomy; the elevator was not working and in the stairwell, from the fourth floor on up, a sort of strange musty smell came down to me, a cold smell of earth and stone which I was perfectly familiar with because in the room it was my very life. I always carried the key with me, and as a precaution I carried it in a wallet. Imagine that stairwell plunged in darkness, where I was groping my way up. Two steps from the door I had a shock: the key was no longer there. My fear had always been that I would lose that key. Often, during the day, I would search my wallet for it; it was a little key, a Yale key, I knew every detail of it. This loss brought back all my anxiety in an instant, and it had been augmented by such a powerful certainty of un­happiness that I had that unhappiness in my mouth and the taste of it has remained there ever since. I was not thinking anymore. I was behind that door. This might seem ridiculous, but I think I begged it, entreated it, I think I cursed it, but when it did not respond, I did something which can only be explained by my lack of self-control: I struck it violently with my fist, and it opened immediately.

I will say very little about what happened then: what happened had already happened long ago, or for a long time had been so imminent that not to have revealed it, when I felt it every night of my life, is a sign of my secret understanding with this premonition. I did not have to take another step to know that there was someone in that room. That if I went forward, all of a sudden someone would be there in front of me, pressing up against me, absolutely near me, of a proxi­mity that people are not aware of: I knew that too. Everything about that room, plunged in the most pro­found darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life, a life which is not life, but which is stronger than life and which no force in the world could ever overcome. That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it. And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me, absolutely similar to others, which clasps my body with its body, marks my mouth with its mouth, whose eyes open, whose eyes are the most alive, the most profound eyes in the world, and whose eyes see me. May the person who does not understand that come and die. Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into a falsehood. 

I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes toward it will become this very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. […]