Ten days later, the count returned and we left for Portugal. During what remained of my time in Paris with Rytmel, I said nothing of my doubts, and he seemed unconcerned about anything but our love for each other.
I returned to Lisbon and received regular letters from him. I used to study them, picking the sentences apart word by word to find the emotion concealed behind them. Alas, I always ended up discovering a gradual cooling in his feelings for me. Rytmel wrote very cheerfully and logically, trying to put his heart into what he wrote. His love was clearly changing from passion to reason. He spoke critically of love: proof that he was not dominated by it. He had even begun to use clever literary words. He waxed rhetorical! At the same time, his handwriting became firmer; he no longer wrote with the crooked, jerky, impetuous, pulsating hand that had so enchanted me. Now he wrote in a vile English cursive script, prudent and correct. He no longer wrote to me on whatever scrap of paper he could find, on pages torn from notebooks, on the backs of old letters, as the passion took him. He wrote instead on perfumed paper bought at Maison Maquet! The poor darling, what his heart may have lacked in love, his paper more than made up for in perfume!
And I? Perhaps the time has come for me to speak of my feelings. I hesitated to do so. I did not wish to place my heart on this page as if on a dissecting table. But I have thought better of it. I am no longer someone. I do not exist. I have no individuality. I am not a living woman, with nerves, defects, modesty. I am a case study, an example, a sort of specimen. I do not live by breathing nor by the circulation of my blood: I live abstractly, through the opinions and comments of those who read the Diário de Notícias, through the discussions that my griefs provoke. I am not a woman, I am a novel.