He radiated a strength, a zest for living, a calm dynamism that came at you in warm waves. Friendliness. I can think of no better word to describe the sense of kindness and good manners he carried about with him. It worked on men. Was there any limit to his power to attract women? He had a way of looking at them, with an affectionate irony, a slightly sidelong glance, smoothing the ends of his clipped moustache with one forefinger at the corner of his lips … Good old Edouard! He really has swallowed the honeyed poison of heterosexuality by the bucketful! What an appetite! What bliss!

The result was not long coming. Edouard’s charm is the— frequently irresistible—kind which belongs to weak men, lacking in character. He was married when he was scarcely out of his teens. Maria-Barbara’s confinement followed hard on the honeymoon. Since then she has never stopped. She was no sooner up and about than she was promptly brought to bed again, so that it seemed as though she could get pregnant from the very air. I have not seen her very often, but never without her feet up. Beautiful, oh beautiful! The majestic alma genitrix in all her serene splendor. Behold the tender womb, teeming with fruitfulness, perpetually surrounded by flocks of children, like the Roman she-wolf. Then, as though the processes of gestation were still too slow for her, she had twins. Are there no lengths she will not go to?

I have gone on seeing Edouard, at lengthy intervals, in Paris. Our mother was the occasion for meetings which were not disagreeable but which we should not have sought, either of us, but for her. I watched exhaustion and then illness undermine that happy temperament What with the grinding boredom of business and family life at the Pierres Sonnantes and his little trips to Paris which turned into increasingly protracted binges, his fine presence sagged, his confident talk ebbed, and the rather boyishly plump cheeks collapsed into unhealthy folds. His life was divided between the boredom of Brittany and the strain of Paris, encouraged by Maria-Barbara’s excessive motherliness and the over-worldliness of his mistress, Florence. I heard that he was diabetic. His plumpness ran to fat which then hung in folds of flesh on what seemed suddenly a narrow, skeletal frame.

Really he is a most depressing case. There is a man, handsome, generous, attractive, hard-working, a man perfectly in tune with his age and environment, a man who has always said yes to everything, sincerely, from the bottom of his heart—yes to his family, yes to all the normal pleasures, yes to the pains inseparable from the human condition. His great strength has always been in loving. He has loved women, good food and wine, stimulating company, but just as surely his wife, his children, the Pierres Sonnantes, and, more surely still, Brittany and France.

In all fairness, his life ought to have gone up and up, a triumphal path, strewn with happiness and honors, culminating in an apotheosis. Instead, there he is going downhill, turning to the sere and yellow … I daresay he will come to a bad end.

While as for me, obliged from the beginning to take things and people frankly from the wrong angle, moving permanently in a counterclockwise direction, I have constructed a universe for myself, crazy maybe, but coherent and above all one that suits me, in the way that certain mollusks secrete about their bodies a shell which, though misshapen, fits them perfectly. I have no illusions about the strength or soundness of my construction. I am a condemned man under a stay of execution. Nevertheless, I can see that my brother, having eaten his seed corn at a time when I was little, ugly and wretched, must today be envying me my good health and abounding appetite for life.

All of which proves that happiness should consist of a proper mixture of the given and the manufactured. Edouard’s was almost entirely given to him in the cradle. It was an unimpeachable and very comfortable store-bought garment which, since he was a stock size, fitted him like a glove. Then, with the years, it became worn and tattered and fell into rags, and Edouard watched the ruin of it in grief and helplessness.

My case errs in the opposite direction.