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Now, one Novembcr evening shortly after my morher’s death, I was going through some photographs. I had no hopc of "finding” her, I expected nothing from thesc "photographs of a being hcforc which one recalls less of chat being than by mcrely thinking of him or hcr" (Proust). I had acknowledged rhat fatality, one of the most agonizing features of mourn-ing, which dccrecd that however often I might consult such images, I could never recall her fearures (summon them up as a cotality). No, what 1 wanred—as Valćry w'anted, after his morher’s death—was "to write a littlc compilation about hcr, just for myself" (perhaps 1 shall write it one day, so that, princed, hcr memory will last at Ieast the timc of my own notoricty). Further, I could nor evcn say about these photographs, if we except the one I had already published (which shows my mocher as a young woman on a beach of Les Landes, and in which 1 recognizcd" her gait, hcr hcalth, hcr glow—but not hcr face, which is too far away), I could not even say that I loved them: I was not sitting down to contemplate them, 1 was not engulfing myself in them. I was sorting them, but