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NaDAR: Thh Artists Mon i er {or Wiph)

one ńnger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gestute. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of thcir parents, who wcre soon to divorce, had poscd side by sidc, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house w herc my tnothct was bom, in Chennevierc$-sur-Marnc).

I Studied the lirtlc girl and at last rediscovered my mother The distinctness of her face, the na'ive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding hersclf, and finally her expression, which distinguished her, likc Good from Evil, from the hysrerical little girl, from the simpcring doli who plays at being a grownup—all this constituted tlve figurę of a sov-ereign innocence (if you will rake this word according to its etymology, which is: "1 do no harm"), all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untcnable paradox which she had nonethelcss maintaincd all her life: the assettion of a gcntleness^ln this little girls image I saw the kindncss which had formed her being immedi-arcly and fotevcr, without her having inhcriced it from anyone; how could this kindncss have procecded from the impcrfect parents who had loved het so badly—in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-płay, it helonged to no system, or at least it was located at the Iimits of a morality (cvangelical, for instantc); I could not define it better than by this fearure (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never madę a single "obscrvation.” This cxtremc and particular cit-cumstance, so ahstract in rclation to an image, was nonc-theless prcscnt in the face rcvcaled in the photograph 1