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reads what he approves of he thinks he could have written it. He may even have a grudge against the book for taking his place, for saying what he did not know how to say, and which according to him he would have said better.
    The more a book means to us the less well we read it. Our substance slips into it and thinks it round to our own outlook. That is why if I want to read and convince myself that I canread, I read books into which my substance does not penetrate. In the hospitals in which I spent long periods, I used to read what the nurse brought me or what fell into my hands by chance. These were the books of Paul Féval, of Maurice Leblanc, of Xavier Leroux, and the innumerable adventure books and detective stories which made of me a modest and attentive reader.
Rocambole
,
M. Lecoq
,
Le crime d’Orcival
,
Fantômes
,
Chéri-Bibi
, while saying to me: ‘You can read’, spoke to me too much in my own language for me not to get something, unconsciously, from them, for my mind not to distort them to its own dimensions. This is so true that, for instance, you often hear a tubercular patient say of Thomas Mann’s book
The Magic Mountain
: ‘That is a book one couldn’t understand if one hadn’t been tubercular.’ In fact Thomas Mann wrote it without being this and for the very purpose of making those who had not experienced tuberculosis understand it.
    We are all ill and only know how to read books which deal with our malady. This is why books dealing with love are so successful, since everyone believes that he is the only one to experience it. He thinks: ‘This book is addressed to me. What can anyone else see in it?’ ‘How beautiful this book is,’ says the one they love, by whom they believe themselves to be loved and whom they hasten to make read it. But that person says this because he or she loves elsewhere.
    It is enough to make one wonder if the function of books, all of which speak to convince, is not to listen and to nod assent. In Balzac the reader is in his element: ‘This is my uncle,’ he tells himself, ‘this is my aunt, this is my grandfather, this is Madame X …, this is the town where I was born.’ In Dostoievsky what does he tell himself? ‘This is my fever and my violence, of which those around me have no suspicion.’
    And the reader believes he is reading. The glass without quicksilver seems to him a true mirror. He recognizes thescene enacted behind it. How closely it resembles what he is thinking! How clearly it reflects his image! How well they collaborate, he and it! How well they
reflect
!
    Just as in museums there are certain pictures with legends—I mean that give rise to legends—and which the other pictures must consider with distaste (
La Giaconda, L’Indifférent
, Millet’s
Angelus
, etc.…). Certain books give rise to legends and their fate is different from that of other books, even if these are a hundred times finer.
    Le Grand Meaulnes
is typical of such books. And one of mine:
Les Enfants Terribles
, shares this strange privilege. Those who read it and read themselves into it became, through the fact that they believed themselves to be living my ink, the victims of a resemblance that they had to keep up. This resulted in an artificial confusion and the putting into conscious practice a state of affairs for which unconsciousness is the only excuse. The works that say to me: ‘I am your book’, ‘We are your books’ are innumerable. The war, the post-war, a lack of liberty, which at first sight seem to make a certain way of life impossible, do not discourage them.
    In writing this book in the Saint-Cloud clinic I drew inspiration partly from friends of mine, a brother and a sister, whom I believed to be the only people living in this way. I did not expect many reactions because of the principle I was affirming. For who, I thought, will read themselves into this? Not even those with whom I am dealing, since their charm lies in not knowing what they are. In fact,