Granted I read this in translation rather than the original French, but all credit to both author and translator here because the language is absolutely beautiful. I first came across this book in an Irish hotel, and (resisting the urge to steal it) eventually found a second-hand copy somewhere else, years later. The decision of the author to deceive her husband, letting him believe after an operation for cancer that he would recover when both she and his doctors knew he would not, is a confronting one. I'd never understood, before, why the book lacked any explanation for this - there's no description of Gérard Philipe's personality that indicates he would crumble under the knowledge of his approaching death. It always seemed a hole in the text to me. But I've recently finished Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, which describes how keeping their terminal status from patients was common in the France of the time, and that explains the absence. It's still a choice I have difficulty with, but it's horribly, painfully clear from this memoir that Anne Philipe wrestled with it as well, trying to keep from her husband knowledge of his fate through the final weeks of his life, trying desperately to spare him the suffering of it and trying not to sink under secrets herself. Whatever you think of her actions, this is a small, sad, struggling, perfect little book.