The Diary of Anais Nin, March 25, 1932:

"Late at night. I am at Louveciennes. I am sitting by the fire in my bedroom. The heavy curtains are drawn. The room feels heavy and deeply anchored in the earth. One can smell the odors of the wet trees, the wet grass outside. They are blown in by the wind through the chimney. The walls are a yard thick, thick enough to dig bookshelves into them, beside the bed. The bed is wide and low. Henry called my house a laboratory of the soul. ... Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that everyone of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin, even Henry, who believes himself so free, blithe, and unscarred. Enter here where one discovers that destiny can be directed, that one does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern.

"Fred, Henry, other friends, and I at the cafe. Talking, discussing, arguing, storytelling until the lights went out in the street, the night was dispersed, and a dim, shy, sienna-colored dawn entered the window. The dawn! ... Henry thought it was the dawn itself that was a new experience. I could not explain what I felt. It was the first time I had not felt the compulsion to escape ... . At a party, at a visit, at a play, a film, came a moment of anguish. I cannot sustain the role, the pretense that I am at one with others, synchronized. Where was the exit?

"Henry's responses to all things, his capacity for seeing so much in everybody, in everything. I had never looked at a street as Henry does: every doorway, every lamp, every window, every courtyard, every shop, every object in the shop, every cafe, every hidden-away bookshop, hidden-away antique shop, every news vendor, every lottery-ticket vendor, every blind man, every beggar, every clock, every church, every whore house, every wineshop, every shop where they sell erotica and transparent underwear, the circus, the nightclub singers, the strip tease, the girly shows, the penny movies in the arcade, the bal musettes, the artist balls, the apache quarters, the flea market, the gypsy carts, the markets early in the morning. When we come out of the cafe, it is raining. Rain does not bother him. Hunger or thirst only. Shabby rooms don't bother him. Poverty does not bother him. You drink a fiery Chartreuse at a zinc counter. In life he follows his impulses, always. The only thing which surprises me is that he has no desire to meet other writers, musicians, painters, his equals. ... 'No,' says Henry, 'What would they see in me?'"